[SGVLUG] port knocking anyone?

[Claude Felizardo]

So like I'm leaving on a week long vacation tomorrow and remembered
that i wanted to make sure that I still had port knocking working so I
can connect remotely and push photos home in case I lose my
camera/laptop.  I guess it's been a while since I last tried it as
it's not working.   First problem is that my router was forwarding the
block of ports to the internal IP of my old file server so I switched
it to the new server and discovered that I was now able to access my
slimserver. huh?  Never got around to try streaming music from home.
Used Amarok to verify that it works then restored restored the port
forwarding rules so it's not exposed.  Will have to give that a try
again when i get back.

So I did a google search for when I gave my port knocking demo and see
that it was April '07 and of course both my laptop and fileserver have
since been upgraded.  I believe when I gave the demo on my laptop, I
used a different set of ports than what I used at home.  Tried the
other set of ports and now I get the TCP wrapper rejection message
because the entries in /etc/services and /etc/hosts.allow don't match.
 Normally I use a different set of ports when I connect from trusted
machines with fixed IP's so I never noticed this problem until now.

Also looks like xinetd is no longer installed which is what i think I
was relying on at one point.  Perhaps I was starting up the extra
instance of sshd another way.  I was probably running Mandriva 2007.x
for the demo and probably 2006.x at home.  it's all 2008.0 now.

Anyone currently using port knocking?  I'd like to get this working
ASAP as I don't think my mother-in-law who's dog sitting while we are
gone will appreciate me calling in the middle of the night asking her
to type arcane commands to the console to open a port manually.

claude