How to add custom xinetd Service in pfSense

Question

On a pfSense 2.4, I installed a custom xinetd service. I appended the necessary line to the list in /etc/services and wrote a stanza in /var/etc/xinetd.conf. After reloading xinetd, the service runs successfully.

However, the file /var/etc/xinetd.conf gets overwritten after some time automatically, and the stanza I wrote gets removed, and the service is being reloaded, and so my custom xinetd service disappears.

How can I make the changes to the xinetd configuration persistent?

Answer 1

The config file stored in /var/etc/xinetd.conf is regenerated every time you perform a filter reload.

To make changes to this process, you need to modify the filter reload process, you can find it on /etc/inc/filter.inc.

Start by creating a directory of xinetd config files that will be included at filter reload time:

 mkdir -p /opt/etc/xinetd.d

Create your custom xinetd config file inside that dir, e.g.: /opt/etc/xinetd.d/custom.conf

Open /etc/inc/filter.inc in your favourite editor and find the line which begins with fclose($xinetd_fd);

This is the last part of the xinetd.conf file generation function. Before that line add the fwrite line below, the end result should look like this:

    fwrite($xinetd_fd, "includedir /opt/etc/xinetd.d");
    fclose($xinetd_fd);             // Close file handle

Manually initiate a filter reload from Status / Filter Reload / Reload Filters and verify that custom.conf has been loaded as well.