Enable Root login through Telnet

Almost all Linux distributions now a days come with “root” login disabled through telnet. Some distributions doesn’t have telnet login service at all. This is generally a Good Thing, because telnet login needs passwords to be sent over the network in plain-text format. This has lots of security implications, like anybody snooping your network can read your password.

But still, sometimes you may need to enable root login through telnet. Below are steps to enable this for RHEL5 (GA).

1. Make sure you have xinetd and telnet-server packages installed on your box. You can verify this using below commands

    $ rpm -qa | grep xinetd
    $ rpm -qa | grep telnet-server

2. If you don’t have above packages installed (which is the case by default) download or copy those packages and install them using,

    # rpm -i xinetd*.rpm telnet-server*.rpm

command.

3. Now enable the xinetd service. To do this you need to run two commands

    # service xinetd start
    # chkconfig xinetd on

4. Now you can enable telnet service either using “serviceconf” GUI utility or by manually editing /etc/xinetd.d/telnet files.

5. By now telnet login service will be up and running on your box. But it is by default disabled for root user. You can enable it by appending pts/0, pts/1,…, pts/9, etc. entries into /etc/securetty file. Once you do this, you will be able to open 10 root sessions through telnet.

Have Fun.