[cobalt-users] Open SSH and Telnet problems [RaQ3]

["d e p e u p l e u r" <listening@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi again,  sorry to double post but we really need a hand with this

A few months ago I had to deal with the infamous timeout problem of the
telnet login prompt, the question has been asked in this list many times and
yet no one has ever repied with a solution or explanation.  The kernel
version is displayed when trying to connect to telnet but there is no login
prompt, the client is disconnected after what looks like a timeout.  There
is no apparent cuase for this.  Any help on this would be appreciated.

Upon the first occurence of this phenomenon the simple solution was to
install OpenSSH and shut down telnet altogether.  That solutions was perfect
until I did an upgrade that required a reboot, after the reboot port 22 for
the OpenSSH was nowhere to be found, since Telnet was not working either I
was shut out with no access to the shell.  The solution came in the form of
an upgrade for OpenSSH to the current version provided by the Cobalt EMEA
site at http://pkg.nl.cobalt.com/ .  The RaQ3-RaQ4-OpenSSH-2.9p1-1 package
installed on top with no problem and upon reboot I had access again.  Even
so, there was no satisfactory explanation for either event.

Yesterday after applying an overdue upgrade the machine rebooted and shut
the port 22 for OpenSSH again.  Once again, no access.

I did find a mention in the list to the fact that one had to manually link
/etc/rc.d/init.d/ssh to /etc/rc3.d and some other ones.  This seems like a
likely explanation for the port not showing up on reboot.  Yet it would seem
like an unlikely thing to leave out of a publicly available package.

Here are the questions, any help you wise people can give will be greatly
appreciated by myself and quite a lot of other users who have gone through
this problem:

1)  What is causing OpenSSH to shut down on reboot?

2)  What's the problem with the Telnet prompt?

3)  Is there any way to issue shell commands as root from somewhere else?
(cgis through port 81, etc)

Specs:  The machine is a RaQ3 running virtual sites and a primary DNS
service as well as mail server.  Nothing funny installed aside from OpenSSH
and PHP/Mysql, and some security stuff like Logcheck, Portsentry and other
basic security stuff.