Can Linux network service names contain periods?

So I was doing some testing of inetd and xinetd.

inetd is just like xinetd except that xinetd has an 'x' in it. (Just joking. Here's a slightly better answer).

So I wanted to test two different versions of my service, and the machine I had root access to was using xinetd, so I followed some RedHat documentation I found on the net.

The files in the /etc/xinetd.d/ directory contains the configuration files for each service managed by xinetd and the names of the files correlate to the service. As with xinetd.conf, this file is read only when the xinetd service is started. For any changes to take effect, the administrator must restart the xinetd service.

I was a little bit confused about "the names of the files correlate to the service", so I read further in the RedHat docs:

service — Defines the service name, usually one listed in the /etc/services file.

I looked in my /etc/xinetd.d directory, and sure enough I had some existing files:

$ ls /etc/xinetd.d
chargen daytime discard echo time

Sounds pretty good, so I created two new files:

$ sudo vim /etc/xinetd.d/server.1 /etc/xinetd.d/server.2

I put in some simple configuration, restarted xinetd, and ...

...

... nothing happened.

After a bunch of flailing around, I found /var/log/syslog, where xinetd reported that it loaded the configuration files /etc/xinetd.d/chargen, /etc/xinetd.d/daytime, /etc/xinetd.d/discard, /etc/xinetd.d/echo, and /etc/xinetd.d/time.

There weren't any other error messages or complaints.

It just quietly omitted my service configuration files.

A colleague, stopping by (mostly to stop the full-volume stream of profanities I was directing at my computer screen), looked over my shoulder and said:

Hmm.. I wonder if period is an illegal character in a service name?

WHAT?

Well, sure enough, I renamed those two files from "server.1" and "server.2" to "server1" and "server2", and restarted xinetd, ...

... and everything worked fine.

So I poked around in places like Linux Network Administrators Guide and Linux Networking HOWTO, and read:

service specifies the service name

and

name

A single word name that represents the service being described.

I guess Real Linux System Administrators don't need things like this documented, and don't need their tools to print syntax error messages when they make simple syntax errors in naming their network services.

I'll go back to getting useful work done. Bummer about those 90 minutes of my life; I could have maybe used them for something useful.