Re: inetd or xinetd

[Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>]

> I would say that the choice between the two is defined not by how
> 'professional' your host is, but rather by the hostility of the
> networking environment. Xinetd can limit the number of connections and
> running processes, preventing some DoS attacks. Xinetd also has a more
> extensive logging. There are other improvements over inetd (see xinetd
> faq [0], for example, or this article [1]). So, if your network is not
> well protected, you may want to replace inetd with xinetd (and don't
> forget to configure it properly :))

> [0] http://www.xinetd.org/faq.html
> [1] http://www.linuxfocus.org/English/November2000/article175.shtml

You may also not care about it.  My /etc/inetd.conf has nothing but
comments, and it's not like I worked hard to keep it that way: the "normal"
content of my inetd.conf (after a plain install plus some months of upgrade
and things like that, none of which related particularly to inetd) is
a single line that starts identd.  I apt-removed pidentd and now it's
completely empty.  At that point, I really couldn't care less whether I'm
using xinetd or inetd.


        Stefan


PS: Funnily enough `apt-get remove openbsd-inetd' says that a whole bunch of
packages depend on it:

   # apt-get remove openbsd-inetd
   Reading package lists... Done
   Building dependency tree... Done
   The following packages will be REMOVED
     at cupsys-bsd ftp mailx mutt netbase ntp ntpdate openbsd-inetd postfix ppp
     pptp-linux pptpconfig telnet
   0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 14 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
   Need to get 0B of archives.
   After unpacking 10.7MB disk space will be freed.
   Do you want to continue [Y/n]? n
   Abort.
   # 

Looks like bugs in the dependencies in `testing'.