Mac OS X Tiger in a Nutshell

xinetd

xinetd , the extended Internet services daemon, is responsible for launching several of Mac OS X’s Internet and other IP-based daemons, including sshd (for secure shell services), ftpd (for FTP services), and smbd (for Windows filesharing and printing services). As you can see by looking at the IPServices startup script, xinetd itself is actually one of the daemons launched by SystemStarter.

Also called a super-server, xinetd launches daemons on-demand, much like mach_init. Super-servers—including xinetd or its simpler predecessor, inetd--are found on most other Unix-like platforms. xinetd determines which daemons it’s responsible for by reading the files, each named for a service, in /etc/xinetd.d/. Each file defines a service and series of attributes, including disable, which defines whether the service is disabled or not, and server, which specifies the daemon to launch when that service is enabled and requested.

Enabling a xinetd service typically means setting that service’s disable attribute to no and sending xinetd a kill -HUP signal so it will reload its configuration files. This can of course be done manually with a text editor, but two easier methods exist that make that rarely necessary. First, for the following items the Sharing preference pane does all you need: Windows Sharing, Remote Login, FTP Access, and Remote Apple Events, since they are all controlled by xinetd.

For any other items in /etc/xinetd.d/, you can use the service command, as shown previously ...