Update (success at last) on connecting to localhost

[John De Hoog <dehoog@example.com>]

Thanks to all the great advice, and especially that from Thomas O'Dowd, I 
am at last able to connect to localhost from an NNTP client.

The first problem was that RH7.1 uses xinetd instead of inetd, as many of 
you pointed out. An additional problem was that even after putting in all 
the correct information for the nntp service in the xinetd conf file and 
reloading xinetd, nntp didn't show up as a service -- until I also issued 
service xinetd start, and *then* reloaded [d'oh!]. That did the trick.

Here are the play-by-play details, including the fetchnews command just 
to show how that works.

[root@example.com /]# service xinetd start
Starting xinetd:                                           [  OK  ]
[root@example.com /]# chkconfig --list nntp
error reading information on service nntp: No such file or directory
[root@example.com /]# etc/rc.d/init.d/xinetd reload
Reloading configuration:                                   [  OK  ]
[root@example.com /]# netstat -l -A inet
Active Internet connections (only servers)
Proto Recv-Q Send-Q Local Address           Foreign Address         State
tcp        0      0 *:1024                  *:*                     LISTEN
tcp        0      0 *:wnn4                  *:*                     LISTEN
tcp        0      0 *:sunrpc                *:*                     LISTEN
tcp        0      0 *:1328                  *:*                     LISTEN
tcp        0      0 *:x11                   *:*                     LISTEN
tcp        0      0 *:canna                 *:*                     LISTEN
tcp        0      0 *:nntp                  *:*   LISTEN <-- here it is!
tcp        0      0 localhost.localdom:smtp *:*                     LISTEN
udp        0      0 *:1024                  *:*
udp        0      0 *:sunrpc                *:*
udp        0      0 *:763                   *:*
[root@example.com /]# fetchnews -vvv
1.9.19: verbosity level is 3
Trying to connect to news.alt.net ... connected.
Getting new newsgroups from news.alt.net
Read server info from /var/spool/news/leaf.node/news.alt.net
Disconnected from news.alt.net.

And now when I connect to localhost from my NNTP client, I no longer get 
"Server refused connection" errors.

This is an important milestone in my quest to get real Unix-like services 
up and working. Next will be getting news to work with XEmacs, and then 
mail. Thanks again for all the help! Essentially it was Thomas' 
step-by-step instructions that helped me get it going.
-- 
John De Hoog, Tokyo
dehoog@example.com
http://dehoog.org
Mailer: KMail on KDE (Linux)
日本語対応