In trying to get Samba going on RH8.0, I am using the SMB HOWTO by David Wood, which I gather is the "official" HOWTO on the subject.

As a certified newbie, I do not understand all that I know about these things, and so I have a query: In the HOWTO he refers to "the inetd configuration file, /etc/inetd.conf" which does not exist on my system. (Yes, I do have Samba installed). Instead, there is a file called /etc/xinetd.conf. This is a bit confusing - have they changed the name inetd to xinetd? If so, why?

Thanks,
Newbie John

yes they have, this is asked an awful lot, but you seem to have been the first person ever to notice xinetd in it's place. xinetd is a newer version of the inetd system, using a seperate file for each sevice, unlike inetd which just had it's one conf file. so just use the relative file in /etc/xinetd.d

i guess it's a bit out of daet, although slackware still uses inetd as do a few others.

OK, that is a good answer and I understand it. I did look at the man page on xinetd and now understand that the "x" stands for "extended." However, I had not picked up on the xinetd.d directory, so that probably saves me some trouble. :-)

Thanks,
John