NAME

onenetd - listen on a TCP port and launch a program to handle requests

SYNOPSIS

onenetd [options] ADDRESS PORT COMMAND ...

DESCRIPTION

onenetd binds a TCP socket to port PORT on IP address ADDRESS, listens for and accepts connections, and spawns COMMAND with stdin and stdout (and optionally stderr) connected to the accepted socket.

onenetd may be thought of as a minimal version of inetd, suitable only for listening for "stream tcp nowait" services on a single port. The idea is that multiple copies of onenetd will be run, one for each service. The advantages of onenetd over inetd include:

Connections may be refused with a fixed response after the connection limit is reached.
TCP_NODELAY may be set on a per-port basis.
The address to bind to may be chosen arbitrarily, so it's easy to make a service only listen on localhost, or run several different services on the same port for different interface addresses.
Incoming connections may be logged to stderr.

Note that onenetd only handles TCP connections; it is not possible to run UDP services (such as nmbd) from onenetd.

OPTIONS

ADDRESS: The hostname or IP address to bind() to. Specify 0 (or :: for IPv6) to bind to all addresses.
PORT: The service name or port number to bind() to. In order to bind to a privileged port, onenetd must be initially run as root (although you can use the -u etc. options to switch to another user after the bind has been done). Specify 0 to bind to any available port.
COMMAND ...: The command to execute, as well as its parameters (all parameters given to onenetd after COMMAND are passed to COMMAND as parameters). argv[0] for COMMAND will be set to COMMAND; if you wish to specify a different argv[0], use the argv0 tool from the freedt or daemontools packages.
-c N: Limit the number of connections (and thus child processes) to N. The default is 40.
-6: Bind to an IPv6 address. IPv6 sockets will also accept IPv4 connections, if bound to an appropriate address (e.g. ::).
-g GID: After binding the TCP socket, setgid(GID). GID must be numeric.
-u UID: After binding the TCP socket, setuid(UID). UID must be numeric.
-U: After binding the TCP socket, setgid($GID) and setuid($UID). $GID and $UID must be numeric. This is intended for use with envuidgid (from daemontools or freedt).
-1: After binding the TCP socket, print the local port number to stdout. You can use this when you've specified the local port as 0 to find out what port has been chosen.
-b N: Set the listen() backlog to N. Note that on many operating systems, the listen backlog has an arbitrary limit, or may be entirely ignored. The default is 10.
-D: Set the TCP_NODELAY option on the accepted sockets. This causes the operating system's TCP stack to avoid coalescing smaller packets into larger ones, decreasing latency but reducing throughput.
-Q: Do not print any messages to stderr, except in the case of a fatal error. This is the default.
-v: Print messages to stderr indicating clients connecting and disconnecting. These can be collected for logging purposes using logger, multilog from daemontools, or dumblog from freedt.
-e: Redirect the child's stderr to the socket. By default, only stdin and stdout are redirected.
-h: Print a brief usage message, then exit. The same message will be shown if unknown or invalid arguments are passed.
-r MESSAGE: Normally once the number of active connections has passed the limit set by -c, further connections will not be accepted until the number of active connections has dropped again -- that is, further connections will not be refused, but will not connect until free connections are available. If -r is specified, connections will be accepted and have the constant string MESSAGE printed to them, then will be disconnected; this is done inside the onenetd process without forking, so it does not use up process slots. MESSAGE may contain \r, \n or \t to specify a carriage return, newline or tab character.

EXIT CODE

onenetd returns 0 on success, or 20 on failure (for instance, invalid arguments). Since onenetd is intended to run forever, the exit code is generally not important, and stderr should be examined for diagnostic messages if it exits unexpectedly.

ENVIRONMENT VARIABLES

Following D. J. Bernstein's UCSPI standard, onenetd sets several variables in the child process's environment. These can be used for logging or access control.

PROTO: The string "TCP" for IPv4 connections, or "TCP6" for IPv6 connections.
TCPLOCALIP: The local address of the connected socket, as formatted by inet_ntop (dotted quad for IPv4, hex for IPv6).
TCPLOCALPORT: The local port of the connected socket, as a decimal number.
TCPREMOTEIP: The remote address of the connected socket, as formatted by inet_ntop.
TCPREMOTEPORT: The remote port of the connected socket, as a decimal number.

EXAMPLES

onenetd 0 echo cat: Simulate the standard inetd echo service.
onenetd -v 192.168.1.2 daytime date: Simulate the standard inetd daytime service on the interface 192.168.1.2, logging connections to stderr.
onenetd -1 ::1 0 myprog --my-arguments: Bind to a free port on the IPv6 localhost address, print the port number chosen, and run "myprog --my-arguments" for connections.
onenetd -v -c 5 -r '421 Server full\r\n' 0 21 /usr/sbin/ftpd -a /home/ftp: Run an FTP service with a limit of five concurrent connections, refusing any further connections with an appropriate FTP error message. ftpd will be invoked as "/usr/sbin/ftpd -a /home/ftp".
envuidgid myuser onenetd -v -U 0 25098 myprog --my-arguments: Set user and group to that of myuser, and run "myprog --my-arguments" for connections to port 25098 on any IPv4 interface.

AUTHOR

onenetd was written by Adam Sampson <ats@offog.org>.