We have historically had a small problem with our inetds: every so often when we attempted to restart it with a SIGHUP to make it pick up a configuration change, it would fail to bring up an important UDP-based service we need, reporting a failure to bind to the UDP port.

(We saw the same problem with xinetd; I'm using 'inetd' as as a generic term.)

What was probably happening is that when this would happen, inetd had just spawned the program to handle the service and it was still running when inetd itself was restarting. As part of restarting, most versions of inetd close each TCP or UDP port they were listening on and then reopen and rebind it. (Technically inetd closes the file descriptors that are the listening server sockets.)

For TCP-based services that are running at the time, this is no problem. When inetd spawns a program to handle a TCP service the program is handed a connected socket, which we can label as '(dest-ip, dest-port, my-ip, my-tcp-port)', which does not conflict with inetd re-binding to the listening TCP port, '(*, *, *, my-tcp-port)'.

But UDP-based services are different. Because UDP is connectionless, the only thing inetd can give to programs that it starts to handle UDP services is a full copy of its own listening socket, ie '(*, *, *, my-udp-port)'. So when inetd attempts to re-bind a new listening UDP port, it is trying to recreate '(*, *, *, my-udp-port)' and the kernel refuses because it already has one of those around and it can't have a second (for sensible reasons).

We ran into the problem often enough to be problematic because this UDP service was reasonably frequently used (most UDP services that people have inetd handle are only infrequently used; people tend to make frequently used UDP stuff into actual daemons).

(Because some of the SIGHUP restarts were automatic, it's not quite good enough to SIGHUP inetd repeatedly until it came up right; one would have to write the auto-restart script so that it knew when the UDP port was supposed to be bound to start with and when it wasn't.)