On Tuesday, October 12, 2010 06:56:27 pm Phil Schaffner wrote:
> Ryan Manikowski wrote on 10/11/2010 07:49 PM:
> > http://dotancohen.com/howto/portknocking.html

> Somehow I suspect the OP may have seen that one. :-D

Yeah, nothing quite like being directed to a howto you wrote yourself (getting 
flattered and insulted at the same time!).... I can remember a few cases of 
that, back when I was maintaining the PostgreSQL RPM set (and its README for 
the rpm packaging) and would post advice to folks about the way the RPM's work, 
and then get private e-mail back pointing me to my own README..... and, 
honestly, there was once that the advice I gave in the post and the advice I 
gave in the README was different, and I corrected the README for the next 
release.

As to the ssh business, if a full nmap scan doesn't see things differently, and 
the ssh connections are still working properly from clients, I would have no 
idea how that could be accomplished on the host itself (barring an IDS), other 
than perhaps a hosts.allow or hosts.deny difference, assuming that's set up for 
sshd.  The first thing I would think of otherwise is to check to make sure the 
selinux policy is set for the sshd to actually bind the port, but if that's the 
problem, ssh connections aren't going to work at all.

That is, if the ssh client can connect so can nmap, unless you're doing 
something proactive and IDS-like (perhaps a PacketFence in the line, or similar 
automatic intrusion detection mechanism activating for one server but not the 
other).  Even a small Cisco router with the IDS feature set can do this sort of 
thing on a port-by-port basis, so the nmap scan might be getting blocked that 
way.  That fact should be logged somewhere if that's the case.

With Dotan's background and experience, and the statement about iptables being 
turned off, I would make an educated assumption that there is another firewall 
somewhere to let iptables be turned off temporarily for testing; perhaps that 
firewall is not set up to pass both of the ports?  

These days one can't assume that the network is transparent, even between 
switch ports (packet-level ACLs on the data plane have been available in 
switches for 12 years or more; I have some Cisco Catalyst 8540 hardware that 
does data plane ACL's in hardware, and they're that old).  And with VLAN ACL's 
and deep inspection firewalling being available even in a transparent bridging 
mode (Linux Journal ran a series not long ago about a transparent bridging 
Linux firewall using, IIRC, OpenWRT on a Linksys) even layer 2 adjacency is no 
guarantee of transparency.

Then I'd look to make sure the ssh client's outgoing access is allowed on both 
ports (while that sounds obvious, it's time to check the obvious, it sounds 
like).  Run the client in debug mode and see what it spits out; also use a 
port-configurable tcp-using traceroute equivalent on both port numbers to see 
where blockages might be happening.

When things get this paranoid, my experience has been that fat-fingered port 
numbers and/or IP addresses and/or access-list numbers or names are the typical 
culprits in broken connectivity.  At least those have been my areas of 
mysterious network non-transparency, typically.

Dotan, can you share the nmap command-line you're using with the IP range 
sanitized?
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