This chapter is of interest to those who operate and maintain Unix systems in their environment. These systems come in many flavors, for example Linux distributions, HP-UX, AIX or macOS systems. The Unix world has a big history of computation invention. Various approaches to register system services have been invented, each with their own strenghts and weaknesses.
Unix services queried from a CentOS 8.3 device. This Linux distribution version uses the systemd service manager. The descriptions are provided by the service manager itself. Use these service insights to verify the integrity of your computer system networks.
Definition of an Unix service
An Unix service is a program whose execution is closely tied to the execution of the Unix-like operating system itself. Manager programs are run by the operating system to monitor the reliability of those services. We are mainly talking about main system services in this chapter, but services in general are known to provide their own set of sub-services. A good example of a main system service is a HTTP web server. Each of its offered web applications can be considered as sub service.
Supported Unix-like platforms
Our detection engine supports the following platforms or service managers for service registry retrieval.
•initd-powered systems (Unix)
•systemd (Linux)
•launchd (macOS)
•HP AIX
•HP-UX
•Solaris
This list is not meant to be complete. Further development may introduce new ways to retrieve service information.
Basic description of the Unix service scanning
The Unix service scanning occurs during device inventory. It is part of the set of available information scanners and executed through the Raynet One exclusive Zero Touch Unix Device Scan instrument. It queries data by remote command execution. Advanced information transformation and interpretation is used to provide you with rich insights into the Unix world of services. We go the extra mile to perform deep queries into system components, parsing the data not yet fathomed by others.