Pros and Cons of running under inetd....

[Eric Schuele]

Daniel Bye wrote:
> 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.

Thanks for the response.  I'm of a similar opinion.  For this particular 
application (my laptop and occasional use, plus its usually ipfw'd away 
from the world) I think its fine... and unless I find another solution, 
I'll probably run ftpd under inetd, and sshd standalone.

> 
> Dan
> 


-- 
Regards,
Eric