Do I need these services in inetd.conf

[Dave Johnson_1]

We recently got dinged on our IS audit for having some services enabled in the inetd.conf file. I do not know what these are for. Please advise so I can determine if I need them or if they can be disabled.
echo, chargen, ntalk, printer, daytime, time, discard
Thank in advance,
-Dave

[Tom Danzig · Accepted solution]

No. They are old and obsolete and no longer in use. They can be safely commented in you inetd.conf file.

[Kent Ostby]

All of those are commented out on my system's inetd.conf file.

[A. Clay Stephenson]

All of them with the possible exception of printer can (and almost certainly should) be disabled. Is this host, hosting Remote Printers (in HP-UX speak) for other boxes? If so, then you need the rlpdaemon; otherwise, it too can be commented out.

Just place '#' in front of each of these line, save the file, and issue an 'inetd -c' command to send a SIGHUP (ie, a kill -1 inetd_pid) to the running inetd daemon; this will trigger a reconfiguration of the inetd daemon w/o losing current connections.

[Geoff Wild]

Yes - you can disable those.

You can also disable ident as well.

Rgds...Geoff

[Jeff_Traigle]

Like Clay said, the printer service is the only one you might need.

ntalk is an old protocol for host-to-host communication tool "talk". See the talk man page if your curious about it, but it's been considered a major security hole for many many years.

The others are internal inetd services and are listed in the inetd man page. Telnet to each of the ports, as defined in /etc/services, and you can actually see what they do, but the names are fairly self-describing.

[Dave Johnson_1]

Thank you all for your comments. I will be including this thread in the documentation for the auditors as reasons for turning these off.
-Dave