Public SourceMage Discussion List

[Andrew <afrayedknot AT thefrayedknot.armory.com>]

On Thu, Jul 19, 2007 at 12:50:47PM +0300, Juuso Alasuutari wrote:
> Shorewall has a services file containing 'ftp-data 20/tcp'. According to 
> HISTORY, it was added in 2003-04-04 'to define ftp-data' (no further 
> explanation is provided). Does anyone know why a firewall application would 
> need this, and only this service definition, in its spell? Could it be 
> removed?
> 

Iirc in those days (2003) spells were specifying their additions to the
services spell. So during installation sorcery was supposed to take the
spell's services file and merge it into the main /etc/services file. That
didnt work out very well for reasons I wont go into. A lot of people
started losing their services file which lead to the abandonment of that
feature.

In other words, the file is probably an artifact of the past and can be
safely removed since nothing should be looking for it or using
it (I havent verified that claim though). 'ftp-data 20/tcp' should
already be in services anyway.

-Andrew