[ntp:questions] OT: Solaris help - TOD service

Martin Burnicki martin.burnicki at meinberg.de
Fri Jun 13 07:28:24 UTC 2008


David,

David J Taylor wrote:
> Folks, I appreciate this is off-topic (although time-related), but the
> following statement has been made about the loss of a TOD service in a
> cable modem environment:
> 
> ______________________________________________________
> Have dug around and spoke to a couple of people who deal with the head end
> side of things. The TOD ran on the dhcp servers and the modems were
> configured to get there TOD from them. I believe it was turned off. It
> runs as a service under inetd on Solaris and inetd was switched off as a
> security measure. Due to it being used to give the modem time of day for
> config files, They will not switch it back on again.
> ______________________________________________________
> 
> 
> I have no experience of Solaris, but wouldn't turning off inetd prevent
> any network connectivity, and stop DHCP being served?  Can anyone shed
> light whether the statement contains some grain of truth or not?

I'm not familiar wit TOD, but just a few words to inetd:

Inetd is a "super-daemon" which can start specific network services only if
a request for a specific service arrives.

For services like e.g. FTP this can make sense. If you run a busy FTP server
then you can have the FTP daemon running all the time. However, if the FTP
service is just used occasionally then having the FTP daemon running all
the time would be a waste of resources. 

In such cases inetd can be configured to listen on the FTP port. If an FTP
connection request arrived then ined started the FTP daemon and forward
that request to it.

Of course for ntpd this would not make much sense since ntpd would be
started only when a request from a client arrives.

Martin
-- 
Martin Burnicki

Meinberg Funkuhren
Bad Pyrmont
Germany




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