[systemd-devel] systemd.sockets vs xinetd

[Lennart Poettering]

On Do, 10.02.22 08:41, Yolo von BNANA (yolo at bnana.de) wrote:

> Hello,
>
> i read the following in an LPIC 1 Book:
>
> "
> If you’ve done any investigation into systemd.sockets, you may believe that it makes super servers like xinetd obsolete. At this point in time, that is not true. The xinetd super server offers more functionality than systemd.sockets can currently deliver.
> "
>
> I thought, that this information could be deprecated.
>
> Is systemd.sockets at this point in time a good replacement for xined?

xinetd supports various things systemd does not:

- tcp_wrappers support
- implementation of various internal mini-servers, such as RFC868 time
  server and so on
- SUN RPC support
- configurable access times
- precise configuration of generated log message contents
- stream redirection

and a couple of other minor things. The first 3 of these are outright
obsolete I am sure. We don't implement them for that reason.

Instead of configurable access times we allow you to start/stop the
socket units individually any time, and you could bind that to a clock
on anything else really, it's up to you. I think systemd's logic is
vastly more powerful there. For stream redirection we have
systemd-socket-proxy, which should be at least as good, but is not
implemented in the socket unit logic itself, but as an auxiliary
service.

So yes, it does some stuff we don't. Are there some people who want
those things? I guess there are. But I am also sure that they are
either obsolete if you look at the bigger pictue or better ways to do
them, which we do support.

Or to say this differently: it has been years that anyone filed an RFE
bug on systemd github asking for a feature from xinetd that we lack.

Lennart

--
Lennart Poettering, Berlin