I notice the time service is enabled by default in inetd.

Why is this, and is it actually needed for anything?

Good question. See here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TIME_protocol

I know what time is, which is why I am confused why it is enabled by default. I have disabled it, since I can't imagine anything that would actually need it.

Well - trivially you might want to have an accurate clock to set you watch by but, more importantly, if you ever need to analyse a problem involving logs kept by other devices it enables you to correlate events in logs based on when they happened. Also, if you have share file systems with any other computers it can be essential when determining which is the "latest" version.

Motherboard clocks can be quite inaccurate; having NTP enabled saves having to adjust the time manually. Even if you are lucky enough to have a good clock this matters as the motherboard battery runs down when the clock "drift" becomes large.

The NTP protocol and implementation has been very ingeniously designed to be light on resources so the costs of having NTP enabled are small and the benefits can be useful; I enable it on all devices I administer and commend it to you.

I had thought the time started by inetd was actually separate from NTP, and NTP had replaced it.

Hence time being unnecessary?

You're right Josh, NTP came later. They're not the same thing.

No idea if there's anything out there that still uses it though. I think you're going to be safe disabling it. I disable inetd entirely on my boxes.

HI GazL, that is the point of my confusion. I just wonder why time is still enabled by default, when it isn't useful and is deprecated.

Also, as an OT question, where would I find xinetd? It does not seem to be included as a package, and there are no slackbuilds for it....

I've got an xinetd build script done, but I never finished it because it does not seem to be something that's worth adding to Slackware, and since I don't need it and you're the first person to mention it in over two years, it's just not been worth my time to work on it any more. If you're interested, reply in this thread and I'll put the (unfinished) work somewhere for perusal; otherwise, it can continue to bitrot.

Hi Robby,

It's OK, I don't actually need it, and I'm happy to use src2pkg for the odd software that doesn't have a script. I was just surprised as I have found a build for everything so far. Which is impressive