FreeBSD Security Advisory FreeBSD-SA-03:12.openssh

[Roger Marquis]

>>>This can be dangerous if you are ssh'ed in, and the restart kills your
>>>connection rather than the daemon.
>>
>>     All the restart target does is basically kill the pid using the pid file
>>     and then restart the daemon, so it is no more dangerous then the below.
>
>It's good that the FreeBSD script does not use 'killall' (for instance), but not
>every SysV sshd script is as sensible.  Of course, if you argued that a NG sshd
>RC script might involve dependencies which affected other processes, you'd have
>a point.  :-)

None of these are problems when sshd is run from inetd.  The only
reasons not to run sshd out of inetd are A) if the server needs to
initiate dozens of sessions per minute or B) if it's not running
inetd.

Advantages to using inetd include connection count limiting,
connection rate limiting, tcp_wrappers, address binding, and
simplicity (KIS), among others.

Back when ssh was originally developed, in the days of 50Mhz
processors, key generation time made running sshd out of inetd slow.
For the past several years, however, this has not been an issue.
Why FreeBSd's default installation still uses a legacy stand-alone
ssh daemon is a question many systems administrators are asking.

-- 
Roger Marquis
Roble Systems Consulting
http://www.roble.com/