Tcpwrappers come by default with RH9.

you need to edit /etc/hosts.allow and /etc/hosts.deny.

If you want to protect it slightly more, change your root password to something more secure, and make sure only you know it.

Also, you need to keep up to date with the security patches from Red Hat and now the Fedora legacy project. Red Hat 9 is fairly old now, and a number of vulnerabilities have been found in the system and application software. I find that the easiest way to keep up with this is to install and configure apt4rpm and do an apt-get upgrade periodically (of course, I also watch the mailing lists for fresh vulnerabilities).

I'm curious. If one were not running any services and just running a desktop Linux box for casual internet use, aside from a hardware and/or software firewall, is it safe to disable inetd or xinetd completely and forget about tcpwrappers? What would the purpose be for keeping inetd or xinetd running with tcpwrappers configured when no services would be used by the outside anyway? Why not just stop inetd or xinetd from running completely in this situation? You agree/disagree? I appreciate any helpful replies. Thanks for reading.

a little advice for future, if u get into any condition like this

always check ur /etc/passwd
and /etc/shadow

hacker may have made any fake account with uid and gid 0 for future use.

tcpwrappers is not always associated with xinetd. You can regulate access to ssh, sendmail, samba, etc. daemons using tcpwrappers.

If (x)inetd is not running any services, it can be safely switched off.

If you do not have any services listening on the external interface, obviously your system is sort-of invisible on the net ... better still if it does not respond to echo requests.

Thank you ppuru for your quick and informative reply, I appreciate it.