“xinetd – extended Internet services daemon – provides a
good security against intrusion and reduces the risks of Deny of
Services (DoS) attacks. Like the well known couple (inetd+tcpd), it
allows to fix the access rights for a given machine, but it can do
much more. In this article we will discover its many
features.“
“The classical inetd helps to control network connections to a
computer. When a request comes to a port managed by inetd, then
inetd forwards it to a program called tcpd. Tcpd decides according
to the rules contained in the hosts.{allow, deny} files whether or
not the request is allowed. If the request is allowed the the
corresponding server process can be started (e.g ftp). This
mechanism is also referred to as tcp_wrapper.”
“xinetd provides access control capabilities similar to the ones
provided by tcp_wrapper.”