Is inetd a proxy server?

[Marty Landman]

At 11:12 AM 2/22/2004, Matthew Seaman wrote:

>A proxy listens to all of your request, and then opens up a second 
>connection to the real server (or another
>proxy) for you and replays your request to it -- so all of the traffic is 
>relayed through the proxy.

Newbie here Matthew. Could you please explain how a proxy differs from a 
router? Or are they in many ways intersecting in their functionality? e.g. 
I've got a class c network in my office and recently learned how to use 
apache to reverse proxy a request so that http://my-ip-adr/fbsd becomes the 
same as http://fbsd, where the latter is mapped to the ip addr for my fbsd 
box on the lan by apache. (which btw is kind of cool)

>The point of having inetd(8) is that it provides is a mechanism so that 
>you don't have to have umpty-dozen different small servers running all of 
>the time and taking up your process space.

I notice that mingetty runs ~ half a dozen instances on my box, waiting for 
console users that will never come since as a rule I do everything thru ssh 
on my windows workstation. And httpd, though I've cut the child process 
spec down on the apache conf since it's not needed. Of course the saved 
cycles aren't needed either in my current environment. :)

Could httpd be set up to run via inetd instead of on its own? If so, is it 
not typically done this way because it is usually the biggie app on 
servers? Following that reasoning, if a server were primarily used for ftp 
would it make sense to remove ftpd from inetd's conf file and instead start 
it as a service, assuming that were possible?

Marty Landman   Face 2 Interface Inc 845-679-9387
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