Does Mandrake 8.0 hsve a xinetd.conf file or do you have to write it?

I should be /etc/xinetd.conf.

But if you want to start and stop services, xinetd services are located in /etc/xinetd.d

theres nothing in that file either

I wonder if I, loading a bear bones operating system, omitted something...

You could try whereis xinetd.
This will tell you the location of all xinetd files.

Or

rpm -qa | grep xinetd
To see if the RPM is installed.

I got....

xinetd-2.1.8.9pre14-5mdk

I tried whereis and the files seem to be there.

Thanks Mathieu. It was not loaded...duh

there is no xinetd.conf, it was split into seperte serivce files e.g. /etc/xinetd.d/telnet /etc/xinetd.d/imap etc...

After I got to looking around, and common sense telling me the network wouldn't work at all without it, I realised I installed v6 and the operating system was installed with v4, I began looking around and found preciselywhat you said Chris. I'm just not exactly sure how to deal with it. I can't seem to get my windows machines to acknowlege the existance of the linux box,and I believe they should, even without Samba configured. I never seemed to have a problem with Mandrake 7.2. I should have just kept upgrading instead of buying the newer version. Thanks for clearing that up for me. As near as I can tell, the trick here must be: Don't buy the improved versions of anything, just upgrade what you have, because they improve it to the point where you can't configure it.