Problems with inetd

By Sandra Henry-Stocker

I ran into a problem recently with one of my Solaris 9 servers. For some reason which I have yet to pinpoint, any lines that I add to the /etc/inet/inetd.conf file are removed from the file almost as soon as I finish adding them. Well, almost any lines. Since I generally precede any additions to system configuration files with comments that describe what the lines are for, I did so with these recently added lines as well. When the file was modified, I noticed that only my comments remained in the file of the lines that I had inserted.

The culprit wasn't a cron job. For one thing, there were no obvious cron jobs which could account for what was happening. For another, the timing was odd. The file wasn't changed back on a time boundary (e.g., on the minute). Further, since comments were not removed, it was clear that the file was not simply being overwritten by a copy of the old file. Instead, only the functional entries were being stripped. Some recent change to this system was ensuring that nothing was added to inetd.conf.

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