Tim Haynes wrote:
> Gary Petersen <garyp1492.giggly+news@wiggly.earthlink.above.ne t> writes:
>
>
>>On Thu, 03 Jun 2004 04:52:07 -0500, Gerard created an award-winning crop
>>circle <pqwdme8k5goo.1o43c2qqn2eg7$.dlg@40tude.net>, which when translated
>>into English means this:
>>
>>
>>>[...]
>>>There's a set of files, called hosts.allow and hosts.deny in the /etc
>>>directory that govern access from the outside world to services on your
>>>server.
>>>[...]
>>
>>I thought that /etc/hosts.allow and /etc/hosts.deny are only used
>>by /usr/sbin/tcpd.
>>
>>Unless sshd is started by tcpd, those hosts files probably don't matter.
>
>
> No. They're used by libwrap, which tends to be linked directly into daemons
> these days at configure-time, while I remember tcpd as more of an inetd
> thing.
>
> Oh, and portmapper uses them too.

I wonder if this is a distro thing or just terminology. The
hosts.deny on my RH9 system has comments to the effect:
# hosts.deny This file describes the names of the hosts
which are
# *not* allowed to use the local INET
services, as decided
# by the '/usr/sbin/tcpd' server.
#

I certainly don't know enough to know if that means
something different from what Tim is saying or not,
just posting to perhaps learn ;-).

jmh