RedHat xinetd log question

If the service is disabled, then you will not have any logs from xinetd at all, since the request never reaches xinetd.
You could instead install portsentry, or write a small firewall script that denies and logs all such attempts.

do you really want to be informed about approx. 65000 ports? Then I'd use ipchains/iptables' -j LOG  to do it.
Or more complicated: use tcp.wrapper in xinetd with a logging program of your choice.

No, not all 65000 ports.  Only a select few.

never tried it, but using tcp.wrapper (or tcpd, or whatever RH has named it) and a home-made prog which checks with netstat -pan for the IP ...

  iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --dport xxx -j LOG --log-prefix "DROP-xxx " 
  iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --dport xxx -j DROP

looks much simpler ;-)

<a href="http://www.snort.org/">snort</a> is great at this.  Install it, mess around a bit, and then write some custom rules for it.

The basic format of the rules you will want (the manual can be found <a href="http://www.snort.org/docs/writing_rules/">here</a>) are as follows :

alert tcp any any -> 10.0.0.5 23 (msg:"Telnet traffic";)

This alerts (where it logs to is configurable) when any host and any port tries to connect to 10.0.0.5 port 23 (telnet).

Very simple solution is to install Port Sentry (http://www.psionic.com/products/portsentry.html).  You can set this up to log, alert and/or block on this activity.  If you have a firewall installed (ie ipchains, iptables) PortSentry will not see any ports that you have blocked.  

--Joe

I haven't given up on this question.  I've just been busy with some other stuff and haven't had time to evaluate these suggestions.

jhance:
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