What are these for?

[Matthew Miller]

On Mon, Nov 19, 2012 at 03:51:03PM +0100, lee wrote:
> what is auditd for?  The manpage doesn't tell me, and I can't find any
> documentation about it telling me what the purpose is.  Is there
> anything that speaks against disabling it?

This records secure log messages from the kernel, including SELinux alerts.
You don't technically _need_ it, but these are important messages.

> Similar with mcelog:  What do I need that for?  And benefits from it?  I
> can probably just disable it.

This handles hardware errors. In addition to logging, the daemon can (and is
configured to) take some corrective and preventative actions. You basically
want this.

> Do I need polkitd?  It doesn't make sense to me; if I want to do
> something for which more permissions are required, I do it as root.  So
> what's the benefit I would have from polkitd?

Polkit allows applications to use root permissions for fine-grained actions
rather than running as root all the time. That increases security. For
example, a timezone applet can show you the time as a regular user and only
require extra authentication to change it. However, if you don't want or
need this functionality, applications are supposed to gracefully fall back
to requiring root.


-- 
Matthew Miller  ☁☁☁  Fedora Cloud Architect  ☁☁☁  <mattdm at fedoraproject.org>