Hello Matt.



[snip]
 MB> It is unlikely someone is messing with your system.  In my opinion,
 MB> telnet based bulletin boards to not represent a large enough trophy
 MB> for someone to concern themselves with attacking one.  It would
 MB> most likely be a system update which is having compatibility with
 MB> legacy software.  Could try seeing if running in 'compatibility'
 MB> node would help.

This system takes many hundreds of "hits" per day on port 23.
Bombing runs trying to get to "root" access... Dead ended by OS/2
and VModem that answers port 23.  I look at the bombers and sometimes end
up putting an entire /24 or /16 into the firewall config, depending on
where they're coming from. The config on the BBS machine itself is now over
300 rules long.  It's astounding to watch some moron hitting the port over
and over and over and over trying to break into the system... And then
jumping to a different IP and starting the same nonsense all over again. 
Idiots.  ;-\  Very annoying but ultimately harmless because of the system
itself.  

Same stupidity with the POP3 server on a different machine (also OS/2) with
thousands of user name and password attempts.  What they don't realise is
the way it's set up, even if they could somehow guess a user name and come
up with that user's password, they'd still be "up the creek without a
paddle in a sinking canoe."  Not too many e-mail clients can negotiate
APOP, so let'm try and crack the 20 some-odd character random character
passwords plus the salt.
It's amazing to look at the log file.

Best regards,
Marc

--- timEd/2 1.10.y2k+