[LUAU] Xinetd..

[bbraun at sparcy.synack.net]

Actually, not a whole lot.  

Advantages:
Same program on multiple architectures (very nice for IRIX)
Identical config between architectures (distable configs)
Can limit number of instances of a service (prevents DoS, kinda)
Can limit service by time of day
Don't have to be root to run xinetd, and service doesn't have to be
	in /etc/services
Can redirect tcp streams to a designated IP and port number (useful
	for all you masquerading people out there that want services on
	internal machines accessible from outside)
Can bind to specific interfaces instead of having everything on all
	interfaces
It can give you information on how many of each service is running.
You can log different services to different files or different syslog
	levels.
xinetd and inetd can run concurrently, assuming you don't have them
	both providing the same services.

Disadvantages:
Different config
RPC doesn't work very nicely (if at all)
Until recently it didn't support tcp wrappers (now it supports both
	compiling with libwrap and using tcpd)

That's a brief rundown of the advantages and disadvantages.  On a
plain old host machine with one interface, that isn't providing many
services, I'd say stick with inetd. 
I have had reports from a guy in sweden who is extremely limited 
on resources (cpu, memory, disk, etc), so much so that he wrote
httpi an extremely light weight web server, and he runs it out of
xinetd.  He claims that xinetd is at least 15% faster than the 
native inetd.  Now this claim is almost completely unverifiable,
will differ from inetd to inetd, and on things like the compiler
used, and a number of other things.  But, it is something to 
think about.

Personally, on some of my machines I run xinetd, and on some I run
inetd.  There are times for each.

Rob
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