1.3.71 & xntpd: INADDR_ANY == localhost???

Christopher J. Tengi (tengi@cs.princeton.edu)
Tue, 19 Mar 1996 12:50:33 -0500


When xntpd starts up, it first tries to bind to udp port 123 on INADDR_ANY.
It then tries to bind to UDP port 123 on all of a system's interfaces. One of
these interfaces is usually the loopback interface, with an address of
127.0.0.1.

Somewhere between 1.3.59 and 1.3.71, it appears that INADDR_ANY (0.0.0.0) and
127.0.0.1 became the same thing, as far as the kernel is concerned. If I run
xntpd on a 1.3.59 system, it happily binds to everything it wants, and
continues on its merry way. However, if I try to run the same ELF binary on a
1.3.71 system, the bind to 127.0.0.1 returns -1, with an errno of EADDRINUSE.
Could this have anything to do with configuration of the 1.3.71 kernel, or has
something changed inside the networking code? Is anybody else seeing this?

I am not arguing for or against what xntpd does, but it appears to work
elsewhere, and has worked for me with previous kernels. If it is as simple as
changing something in my config to fix this, please let me know!

Thanks,
/Chris