There are two ways that you can enable and disable the services that the xinetd application listens for: through the command line and through the VAdmin Web interface. This section focuses on controlling xinetd from the command line. For more information about controlling xinetd through the VAdmin Web interface, see the VAdmin chapter of this guide.
The inetctl super command can be run from the command line to enable and disable the services that xinetd listens for as well as start, stop and restart the xinetd application itself. inetctl can be run by any member of the sysadmin group, and has the following syntax:
inetctl start
inetctl stop
inetctl restart
inetctl service on
inetctl service off
The service can be any of the services that xinetd is configured for. For a list of these services, type inetctl by itself.
Example 1: Disabling the Telnet service
As an example, suppose you wanted to disable the Telnet service to provide enhanced security for your server. To do so, you could type the following from the command prompt:
> inetctl telnet off
Example 2: Enabling the ntalk service
Suppose you wanted to enable the ntalk service, which allows your users to use talk, a command line chat program that can be used to chat with users logged into other UNIX servers on the Internet. By default, this service is disabled, but you can enable it with the following command:
> inetctl ntalk on
It is important to note that if the xinetd application is stopped for some reason, none of the services that it is responsible for spawning will be available until it is started again.