Pete's Linux Advent Calendar 2008

The 20th day

Your own Internet Service

The program inetd allows you to easily create your own service. First create a script that will print on stdout the string to display when it will be called:

#!/bin/bash
echo hello, world

save this script for example as /usr/local/sbin/hello. Then add this to /etc/services:

hello 4711/tcp

Finally add this line to /etc/inetd.conf:

hello stream tcp nowait nobody /usr/sbin/tcpd /usr/local/sbin/hello

Make inetd reload its configuration file with pkill -1 inetd. Now if you connect to port 4711 on your server:

$ nc yourserver 4711
hello, world

Pete's Linux Advent Calendar 2008

Comments? send mail to pkruse@arcor.de