Pros and Cons of running under inetd....

[wc_fbsd at xxiii.com]

At 08:42 PM 5/12/2006, Eric Schuele wrote:
>You say tcpwrappers are compiled into ftpd?  Are you sure?  How can 
>I "enable" or otherwise use them?  If I add things to hosts.allow 
>they seem to have no influence.  This would solve my problem as I 
>would not need inetd.

My Bad.  It seems it does not.  It's running from inetd on the box I 
regularly edit hosts.allow on.

The performance benefit inetd once offered -- not having a lot of 
background process for seldom used services -- is not a big deal 
today.  But security-wise, spawning other programs that would just be 
directly listening on a port otherwise doesn't seem terribly 
insecure.  Could it even be argued beneficial? -- you have a single, 
simple piece of code accepting the initial connections, instead of 20 
processes doing the same thing with 20 different pieces of code, any 
one of which could have an exploit.  If an exploit was conceived that 
could take advantage lots of programs listening on any old socket, it 
seems the vulnerability would be lessened, or at least easier to fix.

I don't claim to be an expert security guy or OS programmer, but so 
far I haven't heard an explanation besides "don't do that".

    -Wayne