Tuesday, September 20, 2011

xinetd: restart vs reload

I'm running Ubuntu 11.04. When I change the configuration of xinetd, I have to use
sudo service xinetd reload
rather than
sudo service xinetd restart
Specifically, when I add a custom service to /etc/service and I do "restart", xinetd does not pick up the config changes.

I was getting this error in /var/log/syslog
service/protocol combination not in /etc/services: my-custom-service/tcp
so I added this to /etc/services
# Local services
my-custom-service          13082/tcp

In this circumstance, "restart" did not make xinetd re-read the config files and change its behavior. However, "reload" did.