On Fri, May 12, 2006 at 01:07:22PM -0500, Eric Schuele wrote: > > Although I am curious about ftpd and tcpwrappers.... I am also > interested in whether or not running these daemons under inetd is > preferred or not. If so why? If not, why?
Certainly for anything that has a reasonably expensive start up, such as sshd, you will probably want to run it as a standalone daemon, because it's easier on the system to start it up only once and then fork a new child for each client connection. On the other hand, using inetd will allow you to have only one 'superserver' running, which can spawn the appropriate daemon as required. This means that you won't have idle daemons lying around, as they are cleaned up once the session ends. One obvious shortcoming, as you point out, is that the stock ftpd doesn't seem to understand how to consult /etc/hosts.allow, so if you have one configured already, then you might want to use inetd to control ftpd. There may be alternative ftpd servers in the ports that do know how to use tcpwrappers, but I've never used any others so don't know. So, I suppose the real answer to your question is that you should use inetd if you need to use one of the features that it provides, such as tcpwrappers. I can't think of any reason to not use inetd, and I haven't heard any reasonable arguments suggesting it's particularly bad for your health. YMMV, etc. Dan -- Daniel Bye PGP Key: http://www.slightlystrange.org/pgpkey-dan.asc PGP Key fingerprint: D349 B109 0EB8 2554 4D75 B79A 8B17 F97C 1622 166A _ ASCII ribbon campaign ( ) - against HTML, vCards and X - proprietary attachments in e-mail / \
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