Starting the Server

oidentd can be run as a standalone server or started by a service manager. By default, oidentd forks to the background after starting up.

If you installed oidentd from your distribution's package repositories, an initialization script or systemd service may already have been included in the package. Consult your distribution's documentation for more information.

oidentd needs to be started as root on most systems, but normally drops its privileges automatically after starting up. See Dropping Privileges for details.

Run oidentd to start the server.

oidentd accepts a large number of command-line options. Some commonly used options are:

• -a, --address: bind to the specified address (may be specified multiple times)
• -d, --debug: show messages that may be useful for debugging
• -i, --foreground: do not run as a background process
• -p, --port: listen on the specified port instead of port 113

The oidentd(8) manual page contains a complete list of options with detailed explanations. oidentd --help prints a list with more concise descriptions.

systemd Service

Many systemd-based distributions include service files for oidentd. On these distributions, oidentd can be started and enabled with the following command:

systemctl enable --now oidentd