On Tue, Apr 02, 2002 at 10:23:21AM -0800, Anne Carasik wrote:
> 
> Well, daytime spits out the time of day, time is for NTP,
> and I'm not sure what discard is used for.

No, NTP does not use the time port.  It uses port 123 (ntp in
/etc/services).

Discard is the network equivalent of /dev/null

The question of what to do with these ports comes up every once in a
while on this list.  Some people prefer to leave them on, others turn
them off.  I don't think there's ever been an exploit that involves
these ports, as the code is quite simple (i.e. easy to implement
securely).

> I usually turn off inetd completely. It helps makes things
> quieter on a nessus scan :)

Yes, this is good advice, and something that never occurs to most
people.  Most common services these days run quite happily in standalone
mode, so there's often no reason to use inetd at all.

noah

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