Entry

Can I use inetd and tcpserver on the same machine?

What is the difference between inetd and ucspi-tcp?

Mar 16th, 2000 08:52
Dave Sill, Nathan Wallace, Dave Sill, Greg Owen

inetd and tcpserver work fine together as long as you don't try to
combine them or overlap them. In other words, each service needs to be
handled by either inetd or tcpserver--but not both--and don't use
tcpserver in inetd.conf.
Inetd is a daemon that, when told to listen to a set of ports, will
launch a set of programs in response to traffic on one of those ports.
tcpserver (from ucspi-tcp) is a daemon that, when given a single port
and a single program, will listen to that port and launch that program
in response to traffic on that port.  To listen to multiple services,
you must run multiple tcpserver daemons.
They can, of course, coexist.  The usual case is that you must remove
the line from inetd.conf that tells inetd to listen to the smtp port
before telling tcpserver to listen to the smtp port.  Inetd will
continue to handle the other ports you want listened to.  If you're
having problems where "they don't work together," they're probably both
configured to listen on one port, and conflicting there.
In short... you probably don't want to go through the trouble of ripping
out inetd, because many of the services it handles don't approach the
load that causes inetd problems.  (Of course,  you can if you want to!)