From: Smelly Pooh (plop at domain redbrick.dcu.ie)
Date: Tue 18 Jul 2000 - 23:37:26 IST
In reply to David Neary's flatulent wordings,
> SP K wrote:
> >
> > whats the differnce/advantages of starting something
> > with an intetd entry against starting it under rc.3 ??
> > and vice versa
>
> The most obvious ones are to do with resource usage - if it's called
> from inetd, it's one less process that's running all the time, as inetd
> services are only spawned when requested. Having something running all
> the time has a slightly shorter response time, since you're not spawning
> a process, although that probably only matters at the higher end of
> things.
For a lot of services on modern unices that line is somewhat blurred. For
instance, if you have an inetd service which is constantly being used, the
binary will be cached speeding up response time. OTOH if you have a
standalone server that's not being used, it'll get swapped out. This of
course is more pertinent to services which don't have to read configuration
files on startup (guaranteed response time delay) amongst other things.
> They're the only ones I know - I'm sure there are security concerns, but
> I'm not aware of them :) And there are probably more performance issues
> than the couple I've mentioned.
Well, the biggest security concern is if any standalone server binds to a port
less than 1024 then it must have root access at the time of binding to the
port. Inetd sets appropriate permissions before executing a daemon. Of
course a standalone server can always drop root permissions after binding to
port.
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