This is the answer to Connection Refused
Inetd wasn't running. That's what listens for new network connections and spawns off the appropriate daemon. More modern systems use Xinetd, but the concept is the same.
What apparently killed this turned out to be a Linux machine trying to add a network printer located on this box. Tracing back in syslog showed inetd complaining about something that machine was sending just before it stopped working. This is an older (5.0.5) SCO box, and has never been brought up to date with security patches, so I suspect that some accidental buffer overflow killed inetd. This may have been it: Bugtraq: Security Update: [CSSA-2001-SCO.33] OpenServer 5.0.5: nmap port scanner can kill inetd.
Inetd can be restarted with "tcp stop;tcp start".
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More Articles by Tony Lawrence © 2011-03-13 Tony Lawrence
Being able to break security doesn’t make you a hacker anymore than being able to hotwire cars makes you an automotive engineer. (Eric Raymond)
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Connection Refused Copyright © November 2003 Tony Lawrence
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