Do I have to kick anything after changing /etc/services

[S.Rider]

A user needs me to add a couple tcp services to /etc/services for a database they are adding. It's always been done before on change weekends where the servers were being rebooted anyhow. I'd like to squeeze this one in earlier without a reboot which basically has to approved by royalty around here. I'm thinking that the /etc/services file is read for every request, so no reboot is necessary. Do I have to kick anything (like inetd) after I change the services file ?

[John Poff]

No, it should be pretty much like /etc/hosts and be read as needed.

JP

[Patrick Wallek · Accepted solution]

You might want to do an 'inetd -c' after the change just to be safe. Other than that nothing should be required.

[A. Clay Stephenson]

No, the lookups are done as needed. The exception would be if you were running NIS/NIS+ in which case you would have to push the new maps outs. Another possible exception would be if you changed the value of an existing services entry that already had services running. In that case, you would need to kill the daemons and restart them and if lauched by inetd then you would also need to send a SIGHUP to inetd (or inetd -c) to trigger a reconfiguration.

[DCE]

Issuing the inetd -c command is indeed the "safe" way

The following was pulled from the inetd man page

When invoked, inetd reads /etc/inetd.conf and configures itself to support whatever services are included in that file ....
-c Reconfigure the Internet daemon; in other words, force the current inetd to reread /etc/inetd.conf.


Dave

[Jino.P.V]

just do inetd -c

you are fine