Reasons behind defaulting atd and sendmail

[Patrick O'Callaghan]

On Tue, 2008-09-09 at 16:06 +0200, Timothy Murphy wrote:
> Patrick O'Callaghan wrote:
> 
> > BTW I think I said earlier that I accepted the need for sendmail because
> > some other stuff assumes it exists. I should have said that the other
> > stuff assumes the sendmail *program* is available, but it doesn't assume
> > there is a sendmail *daemon* actually running. AFAIK you could just turn
> > it off. It's not consuming significant resources so it's not a big deal,
> > but from a security standpoint it's good practice not to run stuff you
> > don't need.
> 
> I'm sure you are right.
> On the other hand, there are a large number of services running
> on modern systems whose purposes are shrouded in mystery for me,
> and I would imagine most users.
> I see from "chkconfig --list" that I have 37 services running,
> 17 of which are complete mysteries to me.
> Could I safely turn off rpcgssd? Who knows.

If you look at the comment at the beginning of /etc/rc.d/init.d/rpcgssd
you'll see it's related to NFS clients. Since I'm not using NFS I don't
need it. Other services will have similar comments.

poc