Services

[Matthew Miller]

On Wed, Jan 19, 2005 at 04:14:47PM +0100, markf wrote:
> Specifically, it safe to disable the following:
> readahead

This just reads a bunch of files into memory at system start so that you get
to a login prompt faster. It doesn't remain running after that, so it's not
hurting anything.

> sendmail

You need this, because sometimes system services try to send root (which you
should have aliased to point to your real account, by the way) important
administrative mail. You can also make it run from cron or something, but
there's no real point. It's configured by default to only be accessible from
your local system, so the security impact is lessened.

> xinetd

Probably can turn this off, but it's possible you have some service which
uses it. This is a "super daemon", and its job is to listen on multiple
ports and fire off actual programs to handle the specific requests, so that
those multiple programs don't all have to be running all of the time.

> cpuspeed

This will only load the daemon if it can actually be used by your system. So
if cpuspeed ends up running, you probably want it. And if not, having the
check at boot won't hurt, but neither will turning it off.

> nfs_lock
> rpc*

This stuff, and portmap, you can most likely turn off if you're not using
NFS or NIS.




-- 
Matthew Miller           mattdm at mattdm.org        <http://www.mattdm.org/>
Boston University Linux      ------>                <http://linux.bu.edu/>