Auth

[bb77]

I hope this is a simple question. I'm doing an nmap on my system and it always shows auth as listening. My question is...is this bad? And if I wish to turn it off, where is this accomplished?

Thanks in advance for any responses.

[zeppelinx]

auth is identd. Using it is mostly useless to you, unless you irc. It's generally more helpful to other administrators who can say "user blah was doing something bad to my machine." If you're sure your identd isn't compromised, you know who to lart. Some people say turn it off because it gives out information about what user is running what deamon. Personally, that doesn't bother me much, I don't have anything to hide.

Identd is usually started in /etc/inetd.conf. comment it out and send inetd a SIGHUP to disable identd

Cheers,
Jim Hewlett