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'.