Re: xinetd feature: daemons that listen on multiple ports

On Thu, Aug 07, 2003 at 12:12:23AM +0200, Matthias Andree wrote:
> 
> These are all the regular inetd advantages. We know these. But what
> daemon serves a TCP and UDP request at the same time FOR THE SAME
> REQUEST? I fail to see which daemon would use two sockets for one
> request, synchronization of communiation alone is so expensive this is
> prohibitive. The client uses TCP or UDP, but not both at the same time.

There are several daemons out there that listen on multiple ports.
Portmap listens on both udp and tcp sockets.  Individual clients
do not use both simultaneously, but different clients use different
protocols to get at the same information.  The daemon needs to
respond to requests on both.  Currently, it can't be launched from
an inetd reliably, because there is no way to pass multiple socket
descriptors to the daemon.

> IF there is benefit in serving several IP protocols via several sockets
> at the same time, the services are already implementing that stuff, and
> such features will not go away (squid comes to mind).

I have no intention of making the existing feature sets go away.
However, it may be easy to modify the existing daemons so they can
be launched out of inetd or standalone, like so many other daemons
(sshd, samba, proftpd, etc.)

> Such convienience features are wasted efforts. Slapping on the "daemon
> programmer hat" (I maintain the leafnode NNTP software), I'm not going
> to use such features because that makes my software behave differently
> depending on what inetd incarnation the user uses. This entails:

Fair enough.  I fully understand.  I sincerely wish xinetd didn't 
need to be portable and was for one specific platform for the 
exact same reasons.  As the software maintainer, you're completely
within your rights to reject code.

Thank you for your comments on the passing of information.  I tend
to agree with you that it's not really needed.

Rob