inetd is a daemon on Linux (BSD/Unix) systems that manages Internet services. inetd listens on all ports used by internet services such as FTP, POP3, and telnet. When a TCP packet or UDP packet comes in with a particular port number, inetd launches the appropriate server program to handle the connection. This uses memory more efficiently, as the other daemons do not run constantly.
Under old version of RedHat Linux you can restart inetd (login as root user):
# killall -HUP inetd
Note above command should work with almost any Linux distrobution.
New version of RedHat Linux (Fedora) comes with xinetd daemon, which can be restarted as follows:
# service xinetd restart