Shutting down services

[mychl]

OK, I know that I'm supposed to shut down services I don't need, but how do I know which ones I need. I AM reading stuff, but that won't help me until I've read an awfull lot. So could anyone point me in a fast direction to getting services turned off.

I think that I need to go into rc.d and then cut out some of the symlinks there, but I didn't see anything like finger. I did see sendmail, but do I need that running to send an email from my kmail prog.

Thanks for any info/advice...
:)
Mike

[The King Ant]

You are correct about the removing symlinks from rc.d thing. The services in those directories are all standalone services.

Finger is not usually a standalone server. Usually a small finger server is opened for each finger connection. Check the file /etc/inetd.conf, if you have it. You can simply comment out services from there. You may be using xinetd instead, in which case you should look in the /etc/xinetd.d/ directory and edit the files in there so they are disabled.

Disable what you know you can, and if you have questions about a certain server, post it here and people can give you more information than you thought you wanted to know.

[mychl]

Thanks
;)

[Craig McPherson]

If you don't know what a service is, you don't need it.

If you don't know if you need it, you don't need it.

That's a strategy that'll keep you out of trouble. If you're unsure about that, you can also leave every service running locally but have your firewall block all connections coming in from outside. That's about as good -- although what you really want to do is shut unneeded services down AND have your firewall block all connections coming in from outside, so you have two layers of protection in case one fails.

(And on a side note, you shouldn't remove links from the rc directories, you should rename them, replacing the "S" with a "K". You can run into trouble down the line if you just delete them.)