xinetd

Availability and IPv6 support

Description

Xinetd is a replacement for inetd, the internet services daemon. Xinetd is not just an inetd replacement. Anybody can use it to start servers that don't require privileged ports because xinetd does not require that the services in its configuration file be listed in /etc/services. Its configuration file has a different format than inetd's one and it understands different signals. However the signal-to-action assignment can be changed. It is a lot better than inetd. 1) It can do access control on all services based on: address of remote host or time of access 2) Access control works on all services, whether multi-threaded or single-threaded and for both the TCP and UDP protocols. All UDP packets can be checked as well as all TCP connections. 3) It provides hard reconfiguration kills servers for services that are no longer in the configuration file and kills servers that no longer meet the access control criteria. 4) It can prevent denial-of-access attacks by placing limits on the number of servers for each service (avoids process table overflows), or placing an upper bound on the number of processes it will fork, or placing limits on the size of log files it creates. 5) For every server started it can log: the time when the server was started, the remote host address, who was the remote user (if the other end runs a RFC-931/RFC-1413server), how long the server was running, can be logged for failed attempts too. For some services, if the access control fails, it can log information about the attempted access (for example, it can log the user name and command for the rsh service).

Comments

Usage information

Categories

CategoryApps, CategoryAppssysutils

Source of information

http://www.bieringer.de/linux/IPv6/status/IPv6+Linux-status-apps.html