Open System Services Shell and Utilities Reference Manual (G06.29+, H06.08+, J06.03+)

inetd(8) OSS Shell and Utilities Reference Manual
DESCRIPTION
The inetd process should be run immediately after loading the OSS product files into the OSS
environment. It listens for connections on certain Internet sockets. When a connection is found
on one of its sockets, it decides what service the socket corresponds to, and invokes a program to
service the request. After the program completes the request, it continues to listen on the socket
(except in some cases that are described later in this section). Essentially, inetd allows one
server process to invoke several others, reducing load on the system.
Upon execution, inetd reads its configuration information from a configuration file (either
configfile in the command line or /etc/inetd.conf). There must be an entry in each field of the
configuration file (except as noted below). The fields must be separated by a tab or a space.
Comments are denoted by a # (number sign) at the beginning of a line.
The fields of the configuration file are as follows:
SrvName Soc kType ProtoName Wait/Nowai t UserName [Proc ] SrvPath SrvArgs
SrvName
The name of a valid service in the /etc/services file. For internal services (discussed
later in this section), the service name must be the official name of the service; that is, the
first entry in /etc/services).
SockType
One of stream, dgram,orraw, depending on whether the socket is a stream, datagram,
or raw socket.
ProtoName
A valid protocol as given in /etc/protocols. Examples are tcp or udp.
Wait/Nowait
Applicable to datagram sockets only. (Other sockets should have a nowait entry in this
space.)
If a datagram server connects to its peer, freeing the socket so inetd can receive further
messages on the socket, it is said to be a multithreaded server, and should use the nowait
entry.
For datagram servers that process all incoming datagrams on a socket and eventually time
out, the server is defined as singlethreaded, and should use a wait entry.
UserName
The username of the user for whom the server should run. This allows for servers to be
given less permission than the super ID.
Proc The processor number of one or more processors on which to run the corresponding exter-
nal server process. This field is optional and can be omitted.
This field is used to perform load-balancing of server processes among the processors
within a node. When this field is omitted, inetd assigns each server it starts to the next
available processor in the node. This field is ignored unless the -L flag is specified when
inetd is started.
The number specification must be enclosed in square brackets ([ and ]). If more than one
processor number is used, the numbers can be specified as a range (using a dash between
the lowest and highest processor numbers in the range), as a comma-separated list, or as a
combination of those two formats. The current processor (the processor on which inetd
runs) can be specified using empty brackets ([]). Blanks cannot appear within the brack-
ets.
When inetd is started without specifying the -L flag, the behavior is the same as when
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