I'm just curious why inetd is listening on a port? Here's the output of netstat -ap:

tcp 0 0 *:988 *:* LISTEN 812/inetd

I guess I found what I was looking for - it listens and tranfers incoming connections to the services listed in /etc/services...is that right? If so, why are other services listening on their own? If it's the only service listening according to a portscan with nmap is it alright to shut it down? What surprises me is that nmap couldn't identify it. Isn't it common enough to be a known process?

Thanks for any help.

ident is mostly used in IRC to identify you. Most people don't use it unless they are using IRC

Thanks for that info but I'm looking at INETD. I have ident disabled and just about everything else but inetd is still coming up as an unknown process when I nmap my computer. I tracked it down to see what the process was which was simple enough but now I'm just trying to figure out what the story is behind it and if I shoud keep it running.

It's not inetd that listens to port 988. It's a service that it is started from inetd. Check /etc/inetd.conf to see what services are started from it and disable the ones you don't need

You're right. I went in, commented it all out, what very few I had remaining, restarted inetd and nmap shows nothing.
Are there any processes that must run?

Thanks for helping me out.

Not necessarily. Only if you want a service (ftp for example) then you must uncomment the relevant line in /etc/inetd.conf to enable it.
Regards.

Basically, you can run daemons as standalone eg httpd, sshd or you can run them via (x)inetd.
Loosely speaking, high traffic daemons run on their own, low traffic ones are called by (x)inetd, which listens on their behalf.
There are exceptions eg sshd.
Standalone daemons have their own stop/start controls, the others are controlled by the files in eg /etc/xinetd.d. Just set disable to yes for any you don't want (that are in xinetd area).
Some distros still use (older) inetd daemon, others use the newer xinetd.
HTH

I'm using Slack 9.1 so I have inetd. I just commented out the ones I didn't want and that seemed to do it. I just expected something listed in inetd by default to be identified by nmap. That's sort of where the confusion came in but I think I'm understanding it all now.
Thanks for the posts. Any other information about this that I should know?

This will be informative
netstat -l -Ainet