Network & Academic Computing Services Security Make your UNIX/linux system a low-maintenance machine Use toaster to turn off the daemons that are listening on various ports. What is toaster? A lot of people have UNIX/linux machines that they don't want to spend a lot of time taking care of. Toaster is a shell script that's here to help, by making it so you don't need to watch for security patches - assuming you trust all the people who use the machine. If you trust all the users of the machine, odds are you'll never have to worry about security beyond an infrequent denial-of-service attack (meaning someone may someday be able to crash your system remotely) - the concern of someone breaking in and stealing/removing your files "for the fun/challenge of it" becomes largely a thing of the past. How toaster works Toaster knows how to turn off a bunch of system functionality many people never use. If you never access your machine over the network, you don't need this functionality. Leaving said functionality enabled incurs a maintenance burden many folks would rather not shoulder - and in fact, many folks are unaware of the importance of this maintenance the need for which is mostly eliminated by toaster. So anyway, toaster just runs around renaming and commenting out things in various boot-time initialization scripts, so that your machine becomes less of a server, and more of a workstation. Using toaster Most people can just ftp toaster with a browser or ftp client, save it in /tmp (with "file->save" if you're using netscape), su to root in a shell window (xterm, rxvt, shelltool, whatever) and then say: sh /tmp/toaster Toaster will merrily do its job. It doesn't ask questions, but it does tell you a bit about what it's doing, as it's doing it. Platform-specific notes Redhat Linux Toaster is well tested on Redhat 5.2. Solaris Toaster is well tested on Solaris 7. Caldera OpenLinux Toaster has been tested lightly on OpenLinux. Preliminary results indicate toaster works fine on OpenLinux. HP-UX HP systems are not fully supported by toaster at this time. I want to support HP-UX though. If someone can give me an account on an HP-UX box, I'll try to remedy this problem as best I can. Sample output Here's some (slightly old) sample output - this is what you see when you run toaster 0.4 on a Solaris 7 machine. dcs@uci.edu Network & Academic Computing Services > Support > Security Updated: August 6, 2003 University of California, Irvine