Pros and Cons of running under inetd....

wc_fbsd at xxiii.com wc_fbsd at xxiii.com
Fri May 12 13:41:37 PDT 2006


At 04:25 PM 5/12/2006, you wrote:
>inetd running is discouraged.  Instead run the daemons on boot using 
>rc scripts.  If you look back in the history, inetd running is a 
>security risk, and was discouraged in the 5.X releases.

Is that still really true?  Waaayyy back when, inetd would have all 
kinds of dangerous services enabled by default (allowing DOS stuff 
like spewing "chargen" into "discard").

But that was a configuration issue, and issues with the services it 
launched;  not with inetd itself.

The authentication is still done within ftpd.  You're just saving the 
tiny overhead of running it all the time for occasional use.  And 
inetd does allow the tcpwrappers for anything it launches (obviously 
the wrappers are compiled into many other things now, ftpd included.)

   -Wayne



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