I have installed RedHat Enterprise 3.0 and 4.0, and i'm observing some strange behavior, at midnight or so. It seems to be a process or a configuration that is taking down some processes, like FTP , LPD and SQLEXECD (informix). I installed both FTP and LPD via RPM, they were not by default on the system, and of course, i installed INFORMIX after the installation of the OS.

Is there such a process validating and taking down not native processes? What should i check in order to fix this problem?

My kernel version is 2.4.21-27.0.2.ELsmp

Thank you

I would expect that if these processes are being deliberately stopped by some other daemon or whatever then it would create a record in /var/log/messages. If there aren't any records showing su activity or killing daemon activity then you may want to increase your log level to info temporarily to see if that will catch whatever is causing these processes to stop.

In order to not waste resources many daemons are actually only started when needed via either inetd.conf or xinetd.d/<file>. The latter is what RHEL uses.

By doing this only a single daemon (inetd) needs to run and whenever there is a request (say to do an ftp) it will see that and start ftpd at that point. After the ftp is complete the deamon it spawned will stop. The next request would start the daemon again.

For some things you want them running all the time because they are used all the time. A good example is "named" which is the BIND (DNS) daemon. So it is not run via inetd setup but is started by an init script at boot.

So it depends on how you've configured things. The fact that they're not running isn't an issue unless they don't run when you invoke the command that would need them.

ftp typically is one you start from xinetd. Not sure about lpd or the Informix one.