[NCLUG] I was hacked!

[John L. Bass]

I didn't presume that at all ... since WKS ports pre-date TCP/IP and inetd by more
than 5 years.

FTPD and TELNETD both pre-date TCP/IP, both existed under ARPANET (at least on the
SRI PDP11/45 I managed in 1977), but used to run as inittab started services. And
that was before ARPANET did the big switch to TCP/IP.  Sometime later, by several
years, inetd came along to cut down on the number out outstanding processes - probably
after select() showed up in the Berkeley VAX port stuff.

The original ARPA UNIX networking code was developed at Urbana and UCLA (user process
deamons), 4-5 years later the Berkeley guys did the TCP/IP implementation mostly
in the kernel under Berkeley Unix for the VAX - most of that team started Sun, and
the two efforts were intertwined for about 3 years. It may have been the same team
that did both portmapper and inetd - but I remember the NFS services first. But nearly
20 years skews timelines.

Portmapper certainly isn't a johnny-come-lately re-implementation of inetd for
RPC services.

John


	On Thu, Jan 04, 2001 at 03:01:16PM -0700, John L. Bass wrote:
	>I think it may pre-date inetd. It was designed at a time when UNIX ethernet
	>was still pretty new stuff, and much of UNIX networking was still ARPANET,
	>and local university hacks.

	By "inetd" I presumed that Mike meant "well-known service" ports.
	Inetd doesn't really do anything except make writing daemons easier...
	Because portmapper uses a WKS port, it's present form is unlikely to
	pre-date them.  ;-)