[my original mail]

> When I try to login into one of the inetd-provided services
> (I tried telnet, rsh, ftp), the connection is established, but
> the NetBSD box will not send any data (verified this with
> "tcpdump").

I finally found the solution - it was a misconfiguration.
/etc/inetd.conf contains a couple of RPC services, but
the portmapper was not running. This makes inetd block for
ages, trying to register or unregister RPC services. In this
time, no requests are served.
This is a bit nasty behaviour of inetd, but of course my fault.
Sorry if I caused any confusion or panic.

> When I look at the machine while the connection blocks,
> the corresponding daemon is not running, and inetd is
> sleeping at "select".

It was actually not "select" but "poll", called from the RPC
library. The tsleep messages are the same. Perhaps
this should be changed.

best regards
Matthias Drochner