The road forward for systemd

Thats the idea, I suppose.

> (I don't have Avahi, BTW)?

You should. It kicks ass. I've long stopped given a shit about static IP configurations and mucking around with DNS on my network because of it. Services like DAAP are cool.

> Can you point out where the blog post says something about _network_ services? Can it even be done correctly?

OK:
> 2. socket: this unit encapsulates a socket in the file-system or on the Internet. We currently support AF_INET, AF_INET6, AF_UNIX sockets of the types stream, datagram, and sequential packet. We also support classic FIFOs as transport. Each socket unit has a matching service unit, that is started if the first connection comes in on the socket or FIFO. Example nscd.socket starts nscd.service on an incoming connection.

So AF_INET == Network Socket for IPv4
So AF_INET6 == Network Socket for IPv6

> Also, what if I want to listen only on a few interfaces (LAN interface and localhost) -

No clue. Apparently for things to work optimally the services need to be patched so that they can take care of those sort of details themselves.

Probably with 'dumb' non-systemd optimized services you'll have to edit Systemd configs a little bit.

> are we going to completely replicate inetd (which I have gladly exterminated from my systems) there?

Sounds like it. Hope so. I like things to be simple.

And, as mentioned we create automatic dependencies between sockets and network interface devices if you for example configure a socket to bind to one particular interface only. That for example is another thing inetd cannot do for you, because it handles only sockets and nothing else. We track and control the entire system state, and hence can easily cover this, too.