Javier Fernández-Sanguino Peña schrieb:
On Wed, Sep 24, 2003 at 03:59:28PM -0400, Noah L. Meyerhans wrote:
For starters, I think portmap, rpc.statd, and inetd should not run by default. Not running a mail server (or perhaps only running one on the loopback interface) would be nice, too.
A mail server is needed since many programs (cron or checksecurity, for example) make use of it to forward information to the administrator.
Grepping /var/log seems more effective to me, than searching mails. Whoever wants mails can use logcheck and this way decide more precisely, what he wants to receive. So I don't know, if it should be the "default" install, but at least an option during the install procedure to get rid of an MTA and simply use syslog for all messages would be nice. I saw more than one system with hundreds of root mails waiting to be read, but nobody cared. And if the default remains installing an MTA, why must it be a fully featured beast and not only a plain ssmtp (or whatever program you prefer to simply use the smarthost principle)? If there is an administrator, then there normally is a central smtp-server, too. BTW, FreeBSD is just introducing this possibility in its install mechanism.
Ciao Siegbert