Managing Solaris 10 inetd services

Prior to Solaris 10, to enable or disable inetd services, the sysadmin would modify the /etc/inetd.conf file. With the introduction of Solaris 10 came inetadm to manage inetd services.

If you run inetadm wiithout any arguments you are presented with a list of all services managed by inetadm and their status. For example:

# inetadm
ENABLED   STATE          FMRI
enabled   online         svc:/application/x11/xfs:default
enabled   online         svc:/application/font/stfsloader:default
   :
   :
disabled  disabled       svc:/network/rpc/metamed:default
disabled  disabled       svc:/network/rpc/metamh:default

To enable or disable inetd services, you have to use the -e (enable) or -d (disable) parameters.

For example, to enable telnet services:

# inetadm -e svc:/network/telnet:default

or in abbreviated format:

# inetadm -e telnet

We can then simple run inetadm to confirm that the service has started successfully:

# inetadm | grep telnet
enabled   online         svc:/network/telnet:default

To disable, simply use the -d flag. For example:

# inetadm -d telnet

To list all the properties for the specified service, we can use the -l flag. For example:

# inetadm -l telnet
SCOPE NAME=VALUE
name="telnet"
endpoint_type="stream"
proto="tcp6"
isrpc=FALSE
wait=FALSE
exec="/usr/local/sbin/tcpd"
arg0="/usr/sbin/in.telnetd"
user="root"
default bind_addr=""
default bind_fail_max=-1
default bind_fail_interval=-1
default max_con_rate=-1
default max_copies=-1
default con_rate_offline=-1
default failrate_cnt=40
default failrate_interval=60
default inherit_env=TRUE
default tcp_trace=FALSE
tcp_wrappers=TRUE
default connection_backlog=10