Enabling and Disabling telnet service on Solaris
For security purposes, administrators may wish to disable telnet on a given Solaris system. This article provides the simple steps necessary to perform this task under Solaris 8 & 9 (updated for Solaris 10 & Solaris 11)
Solaris 8 and Solaris 9
- Confirm telnet is enabled or disabled:
# grep telnet /etc/inetd.conf telnet stream tcp nowait root /usr/sbin/tcpd in.telnetd
If the telnet string is commented out (preceeded with #), then telnet is disabled else it is enabled. - To disable telnet, edit
/etc/inetd.conf
and comment out the telnet string, ie:#telnet stream tcp nowait root /usr/sbin/tcpd in.telnetd
then run# kill -HUP inetd
- To enable telnet, edit
/etc/inetd.conf
and uncomment the telnet string, ietelnet stream tcp nowait root /usr/sbin/tcpd in.telnetd
then perform# kill -HUP inetd
Solaris 10
- Confirm telnet is enabled or not
# inetadm | grep telnet enabled online svc:/network/telnet:default
- To disable telnet, perform:
# inetadm -d telnet
- To enable telnet, perform:
# inetadm -e telnet
- To list details about telnet:
# inetadm -l telnet
Solaris 11
- Confirm state of telnet:
# svcs -a | grep telnet
- To disable telnet, perform:
# svcadm disable svc:/network/telnet:default
- to enable telnet, perform:
# svcadm enable svc:/network/telnet:default
- To list details about telnet:
# svcs -l svc:/network/telnet:default # svcs -xv svc:/network/telnet:default