[gentoo-security] hosts.{allow,deny} vs. iptables.

[Peter Volkov]

Hello.

Can anybody explain the differences, pro/con between the mentioned two
approaches in the subject?

I thought that fewer programs I have on my server the more secure it is.
But gentoo security guide and some people on this list suggest usage of
hosts.allow, hosts.deny files, which only work if I have tpcd installed,
thus another service which weaken server's security. But normaly each
server has iptables installed. So every sysadmin can obtain hosts.allow,
hosts.deny functionality with simple iptables rule like the following:

iptables -A INPUT -s bad_host -j DROP

This is the base functionality of iptables. No PoM is nescesary for such
kind of things.

More. I think some portable bash script that will parse host.* files and
create iptables rules is very simple to write!

So why many people and security guides still suggest the use of tcpd
over simple iptables rules?

Thank you for your time,
Peter.