• Contact: tech-userlevel
• Mentors: Christos Zoulas
• Duration estimate: 175h

inetd is a classic method for launching network programs on-the-fly and some of its ideas are coming back into vogue. Enhancing this daemon should include investigations into other similar systems in other operating systems.

Primary milestones:

• Prefork: Support pre-forking multiple children and keeping them alive for multiple invocations.
• Per service configuration file: Add a per-service configuration file similar to xinetd.
• Make the rate-limiting feature configurable on a per-service basis.
• Improve the logging and make logging modes configurable on a per-service basis.

Nice to have:

• Add include directives to the configuration language to allow service definitions to be installed in /usr/share or /usr/pkg/share.
• Add a separate way to turn services on and off, so they can be defined statically (such as in /usr/share) and turned on and off from /etc.
• Allow non-privileged users to add/remove/change their own services using a separate utility.
• Integrate with the new blocklist daemon.
• Configuration compatibility for systemd socket activations