On Mon, Jun 02, 2003 at 05:26:15AM +0200, Alexander wrote: > Hello ! > > Sometimes when I change my /etc/hosts.allow and kill and start again > inetd, there is no difference. It's like I haven't edited > /etc/hosts.allow. If I continue making changes and stop/start inetd there > are no affections to the inetd daemons, they allow or deny as > /etc/hosts.allow isn't modified since inetd was first started after the > system bootstrapped. > So what I do now is edit /etc/hosts.allow and then reboot. (Pretty ugly) > But I noticed that this happens only to the /etc/inetd.conf daemons. > Stand alone daemons like sshd haven't got such problem the changes occur > immediately.
You don't need to restart inetd(8) when you edit /etc/hosts.allow. TCP wrappers will immediately pick up any changes to that file and apply them to all subsequent processes connecting to a wrapped service. You are probably seeing the effect of persistent connections: either connections that are still ongoing or processes spawned by inetd marked as 'wait', which take over the socket and can accept new connections if they happen to be running already. Since the TCP wrappers function is provided by inetd, it can only be applied at the point that incoming network traffic causes inetd to start up the wrapped process. Generally processes managed by inetd are fairly short lived but there are occasional exceptions: nmbd from the samba suite always seems to start up one time and then run continuously for ever after. Note that long running services with the TCP wrappers functionality compiled in to them (sendmail, sshd etc) will pick up changes to hosts.allow instantaneously. Of course, samba software is itself generally linked against TCP wrappers in exactly this manner. Cheers, Matthew -- Dr Matthew J Seaman MA, D.Phil. 26 The Paddocks Savill Way PGP: http://www.infracaninophile.co.uk/pgpkey Marlow Tel: +44 1628 476614 Bucks., SL7 1TH UK
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