Xinetd

From SysadminWiki

xinetd is the modern version of inetd (http://www.faqs.org/docs/linux_network/x-087-2-appl.inetd.html). inetd (http://www.faqs.org/docs/linux_network/x-087-2-appl.inetd.html) was originally introduced to avoid the proliferation of idle server processes waiting for a connection on a system. In their place there is only one super server (inetd) that listens on all the ports the internet services would listen on and when there is an incoming connection it calls the appropriate daemon. Later tcpd (http://www.faqs.org/docs/linux_network/x-087-2-appl.tcpd.html) was introduced as control access layer. Now xinetd has incorporated tcpd (http://www.faqs.org/docs/linux_network/x-087-2-appl.tcpd.html) functionality through the use of direct library calls and on top of it does also logging automatically even if the contacted server doesn't.

xinetd looks for the server port mapping in /etc/services. /etc/services is a file that should be consulted by any network server is not a xinetd specific file. Its configuration file is /etc/xinetd.conf which might contain all the instructions for different services or it might just point to a directory /etc/xinetd.d where each service has its own configuration file. To disable the service remove the configuration file and send a SIGHUP signal.

kill -s SIGHUP xinetd

or equivalently

kill -1 xinetd

After all this basically you don't need any of the services running under xinetd. The only one that might be useful is tftpd.

For further information: man xinetd