I wanted to test a telnet service on Ubuntu. Telnet is an insecure terminal service that has largely been superseded by ssh. However, I wanted to add it to my collection of services I could measure responsiveness on. But, boy was that a lot harder than I thought! Ubuntu already installs a telnet client for you. But in order to get the telnet service running you have to install inetd, the super-service, which then spawns telnet when you ask for it, based on the inetd.conf file in /etc/inetd.conf. In fact the inetd 'superserver' spawns other services too, not just telnet. So it will be needed for lots of other services I want to test. Cool, so I entered a line in inetd.conf thus:
telnet stream tcp nowait root /usr/sbin/telnetd telnetd
The fields are supposed to represent service-name, socket-type, protocol name, wait/nowait, username, serverpath server-args. Now if I run the inetd service I can indeed log into localhost using telnet, but not from another machine on another interface. Furthermore, there is no way to specify that the telnetd use another interface. After trying everything I could think of the solution was quite simple: install xinetd instead of old inetd, and hey presto, it all worked.
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