Re: inetd Enhancements

[Robert Elz <kre%munnari.OZ.AU@localhost>]

    Date:        Wed, 25 Nov 2020 03:46:43 +0000
    From:        David Holland <dholland-tech%netbsd.org@localhost>
    Message-ID:  <20201125034643.GA1972%netbsd.org@localhost>

  | but modulo the possibility of passing flags to
  | daemons there's only one correct way to define any given inetd
  | service. They are not configuration in the sense of material edited by
  | the sysadmin to adjust how the system operates.

That's not true, I change all kinds of things in inetd.conf to
adjust how the system operates (and I don't mean just enabling or
disabling services, or even just the occasional option change to a daemon).

I run servers on non-standard ports (doesn't everyone?)   I sometimes
run the same server with different configs on different port numbers
(I do that particularly with bozohttpd which accesses different parts
of the filesystem depending upon which port is used to connect to it)

If we ran a nameserver (caching resolver really, rather than a server
for any particular domain) from inetd (which we usually don't, but for
systems with rare name lookup needs, it is a reasonable thing to do,
then we can choose whether it should be udp or tcp or both, v4 or v6
or both.

You might consider this to not be a "correct way to define", but
everything works, and works the way I want it to, which meets my
definition of correct.

One could certainly create a whole new syntax for inetd.conf (or
some replacement in any format) but it needs to be able to specify
almost all the data that is currently there, one way or another
(whether a dgram server is wait or nowait is probably the one thing
that cannot sanely be altered, and depends upon the implementation of
the server, and its protocol).

kre