Several in.identd processes?
 

I recently had a few problems with my Slackware 10 server where it came up with some errors and lost its network connection. I fixed the problems, however, I noticed this morning that there are 7 in.identd processes running which had never been there before. Why would there be 7 of these running?

I'm not sure if you are asking why there are 7 processes running (as opposed to some other number) or whether these are 7 more than you usually see. The daemon is one of those that is most-frequently identified as being a service one ought to disable in order to harden a system. I'm not aware of a recent exploit that relies on it but am aware that it is not considered a "secure" means of authentication (it's main purpose). Here are two URLs that talk about a well-known (but old) exploit:
http://www.cs.yorku.ca/~matt/breakin.html
http://www.linuxsecurity.com/content/view/101952/112/

Here are two LQ links that may be helpful:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...009#post910009
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...hreadid=247913

Here is a note from the University Maryland with a brief explanation about what identd does and why it may not be a good idea to run it.
http://userpages.umbc.edu/~jjasen1/unix/linux.html#4b

Thank you for the links. I disabled inetd for now because after reading up on it, it's not necessary for this server's operations.

What I meant about the processes was that usually I saw none. Then, the server went down suddenly and after getting it back up and running I saw these processes that had never been there before.