The inetd Daemon and the inetd.conf Configuration File

Although a fair number of daemons in the base system have .conf files in the /etc directory, the most important (and sensitive) one you will have to deal with is inetd, the super server. We will take a brief look at inetd here and discuss how to configure it.

The job of inetd is to listen for connections on a specified set of network ports and fire off the appropriate server process when a request comes in. For instance, inetd is in charge of Telnet connections; if your system allows Telnet, you can open a connection to it and receive a login prompt without any telnetd process running on the server beforehand. Every time the system receives a connection request on Port 23, it creates a new ...

Get Sams Teach Yourself FreeBSD® in 24 Hours now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.