Re: A question about services

On Sun, May 30, 2010 at 18:53, AG <computing.account@googlemail.com> wrote:

Hello list

I have some questions about the use of some of the services that are & can be initiated at start up. I see these listed via the Administration menu option, using GNOME on an up-to-date testing Debian system.

1. The following describes my current requirements:

This machine is a single user desktop, provides CUPS server to an ethernet LAN-connected client Debian machine, and both machines access the Internet via a dedicated hardware firewall but separately connected to the pre-firewall hub.

I have no need for bluetooth, sane, power management options, and I don't have a NFS, nor wireless. This machine runs Tor with Tor's new friend, polipo, with privoxy continuing to be updated but seemingly no longer required by Tor.

I have KDE4 installed and Xfce4 and I use GNOME daily. KDE4 requires MySQL.

There is an external USB drive connected to my machine which I access frequently so is mounted at boot up.

2. Services currently activated at start up (according to GNOME):

alsa-utils - audi settings (I'm okay with that)
anacron - actions scheduler (needed)
atd - actions scheduler (needed)
avahi-daemon - multicast DNS service discovery (do I need this?)
cpudfrequtils (shows useful info when called up with hardinfo)
cron - actions scheduler (needed)
cups - printer service (needed)
dirmngr - ? (no idea - sounds reasonable but ...?)
exim4 - mail agent (maybe needed for POP3 and accessing GMail from my email client?)
hal - ? (needed, I think)
kerneloops - automated crash reports support (can't be bad)
lm-sensors - hardware monitor (probably a good thing)
loadcpufreq - ? (maybe worth having enabled?)
mysql - database server (KDE4 seems to need it and it's handy if I needed a decent dBase)
polipo - ? (now seemingly relied on by Tor, which I do want)
portmap - rpc mapper (wasn't this the bette noire for crackers scanning ports? Anyway, do I need it for mounting/ accessing the external USB drive?)
pyro-nsd - ? (seemingly necessary for Python calls & as I have a number of Python utilities and libraries loaded, so will keep that)
rsyslog - ? (systems logging - needed)
sudo - ? (needed)
tor - ? (needed)

3. Questions:

3.1. Do I need anacron *and* atd *and* cron? Do they all work together or am I wasting resources, etc., by having all going? How do I figure out which one is the safest to stop?

3.2. Given the description of my system requirements, do I need to run services like:
* avahi-daemon
* dirmngr
* exim4
* portmap

Thanks for any opinions you can offer.

AG

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