inetd.conf becomes blank after reboot

[Alex Zbyslaw]

Jayesh Jayan wrote:

>Hi,
>
>On some of the machine where I have FreeBSD 5.4, /etc/inetd.conf becomes a
>blank file soon after reboot.
>
>I have kept a copy of the file and when the service fails after reboot I
>restore the backup and restart the inetd service.
>
>What I need to check, to solve this issue. How can this be solved
>permanently ? Please also let me know the logs which I can check to find the
>exact issue.
>
I'm afraid that the most likely cause is something *you* did.  Nothing 
in the system would deliberately remove that file, and if it is 
happening because of some misconfiguration then nothing would appear in 
a log file.

Two things to try:

    1) Find references in /etc and /usr/local/etc to inetd.conf.  These 
are the likely places to find the problem.

find /etc /usr/local/etc -type f -exec egrep -H inetd {} \;

    2) Compare /etc and /usr/local/etc on the failing machines with the 
ones on good machines.


Changing the flags on /etc/inetd.conf to prevent it being blanked should 
work around the symptoms, but not the cause.  This should work:

chflags schg /etc./inetd.conf

But if you run in secure mode you'll need to go down to single-user to 
get rid of the flag, and you can't edit inetd.conf with the flag in place.

--Alex