Relationship between start-stop-daemon and xinetd??

carlos123

I am trying to understand how Gentoo does things underneath in order to figure out how to work around some package installation and configuration hassles and was wondering...

start-stop-daemon is a script which starts or stops processes from what I can tell. xinetd is a super daemon which listens for calls to the various processes that it is running interference for and starts them also.

Is the start-stop-daemon just Gentoo's version of some super daemon? Does it handle any processes that xinetd would normally handle?

Are there any problems between start-stop-daemon starting a process as opposed to xinetd (or even initd) starting a process? In terms of the process environment getting screwed up somehow if xinetd or initd start up the process?

Any insight on this would be appreciated.

Thanks.

Carlos

PowerFactor · Posted: Sun Mar 30, 2003 3:00 am Post subject:

They are totally different things. start-stop-daemon is just a program to make starting and stopping of daemons simpler. The daemons started by it run continuously and bind directly to a network port if they have any networking capability. xinetd is a daemon that runs continously. It listens on whatever ports it is configured for and when it recieves a request starts the associated daemon. It feeds data to the server daemon on standard input and takes the standard output from the daemon and sends it back out to the network. When the communication is over the server shuts down but xinetd keeps runing. xinetd allows you to have multiple servers available without running them all the time. It also allows some added security maesures. You would not want to run a service standalone and through xinetd at the same time. Also some servers, eg. apache, require some configuration change to run through xinetd. And some, such as swat, can only run through xinetd. This all applies to inetd as well. xinetd is just a more advanced version of inetd.

carlos123 · Posted: Sun Mar 30, 2003 9:03 am Post subject:

Thanks PowerFactor. Your explanation does help to clear things up for me. I'll keep studying the underlying Gentoo code until I get it for sure.

Carlos