Re: disabling unneeded services?
On Mon 16 Feb 2015 at 22:01:15 +0530, Sivaram Neelakantan wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 16 2015,Brian wrote:
>
> > The condition you make implies a willingness to investigate what each of
> > these services does and how its removal (or disablement) impacts *your*
> > use of the system. Only then can you make an informed decision.
> >
>
> I'd hate to sound rude but I've got no idea where to begin. Is it the
> rc.* files that I need to look at? IF so, there are 250+ entries in
> it with names that barely give a hint what it's all about.
You do not sound the least bit rude. /etc/init.d and /lib/systemd/system
are places to look for services which are started at boot time. The
files ending in .service given by systemctl are amongst the services
which are activated.
> > Asking about a *particular* service may be a more fruitful avenue of
> > approach.
>
> Again, this is slightly difficult for me to explain. Take for
> example, exim which I believe is a MTA. Do I need it? I don't think
> so but is it needed for the emails that I send through Emacs? Emacs
> that I use to connect to the smtp.gmail.com site through ssl via gnus
> MUA?
This is a good start to your explorations. If you directly specify your
MTA as smtp.gmail.com in Emacs then exim is not involved in sending mail
from your system. If you also collect mail from an external system using
Emacs exim is again not involved. It looks like exim is redundant and
could be purged.
But what about local mail? There is a view that most users never look at
it so exim should be dispensed with. You will have to make up your own
mind about this.
> Ditto Ldap. Why do I need it all? But are there any KDE tools like
> contacts/PIM that need it and will mysteriously crash if LDAP is
> nuked?
Ldap is a mystery to me.
> > If you don't want to use a service
> >
> > apt-get purge <package>
> >
> > works wonders.
>
> Does that mean all packages comes with a service?
No. It means that if you not want to use a service you may as well purge
the package which provides it.
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