Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 92260
Error in manpage for xinetd.conf
Last modified: 2014-08-31 19:25:05 EDT
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.4b) Gecko/20030516 Mozilla Firebird/0.6 Description of problem: Following the manpage of xinetd.conf, the variable "instances" has an unlimited value if not set. This is certainly untrue. With telnet for example, you reach a maximum of 60 parallell telnet sessions, and then xinetd prohibits login. Setting 'instances = UNLIMITED' solves the problem, but the manpage says this is not necessary. This has been reported earlier, already in RedHat 7.1, see bug 78074 Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): xinetd-2.3.11-1.9.0 How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1.Enable telnetd from /etc/xinetd.d/telnet 2.Fire some telnet sessions (more than 60) and look in /var/log/secure 3.Read xinetd.conf(5) and scratch head Actual Results: From /var/log/secure: xinetd[...]: fail: telnet service_limit from=ip ... Server disconnects xinetd.conf manpage lies Expected Results: xinetd.conf should provide accurate information about the 'instances' configuration item. Additional info: This is an old bug that's easy to fix. Just do it. Even better: Include the following line to the standard xinetd.d files: instances = UNLIMITED
Did you remove the "instances = 60" from /etc/xinetd.conf ? The man page describes xinetd's default behavior, but /etc/xinetd.conf and the files in /etc/xinetd.d naturally override it. /etc/xinetd.conf sets "instances = 60" and "cps = 25 30", among other defaults. These defaults are clearly not appropriate for all environments. For all of my machines, they're an order of magnititude too high. For other environments they're too low. Nothing will suit everyone.