Tag: xinetd

Xinetd is a replacement for inetd, which was the original Unix super-daemon used to start network services on demand. The reason for inetd goes back to days of low memory and poor memory management: you didn’t want to keep a service running in memory if it was infrequently used. One process (inetd) would listen for connections on appropriate ports, and fire off the appropriate service when a request came in.