ninetd - A logging, restrictable, flexible alternative to inetd. Ninetd was originally written by Dennis Ferguson[*] a long time ago, during the early phases of CA*Net. Ninetd has been in continuous use here at UTCS/UTCC/UTCNS ever since. At the time, there were no alternatives to inetd. Neither tcpwrappers nor xinetd nor ginetd had been released yet. The first version of ninetd included a flexible configuration, access restriction lists and full logging. Since then, ninetd has been ported to all of the Unix or Unix-like operating systems in our custody (SunOS, AIX, Ultrix, IRIX, Solaris, BSD/OS, Linux, NetBSD, FreeBSD). See src/conf.hints for a complete list of config-file entries and formats. The list in the conf.hints file was compiled by reading ninetd.c itself. There is no man page for ninetd. Dennis never wrote one and we're not quite ready to tackle writing one. But given that this is an inetd replacement, only those who are already quite familiar with inetd should be messing with this anyway. Ninetd is not equipped to handle RPC services. For us, that's no great loss since we don't trust the RPC services which could be handled by inetd anyway. Whenever we encounter a brand new OS, we routinely disable all of inetd's RPC services (and most of the other services, too) until we've ported and/or installed ninetd. Long after Dennis had moved on to greener pastures, we finally added tcpwrapper look-ups and config-file restriction filters. We hope Dennis doesn't mind. While the tcpwrapper look-ups are very useful and very flexible, they can be resource-expensive since each and every look-up requires opening and parsing the hosts_access/hosts_options file(s). For heavily-used services, a restrict list or a restrict filter would be less expensive as all lists and filters are parsed and loaded at configuration time. In this directory: ------------------ Read_Me - this file. ninetd.tar.gz - the tar ball. src/ - the unpacked contents of the tar ball. [*] Dennis's more well-known credits include xntpd and gated. Dennis is also a founder of Juniper Networks (jnx.com).