Reasons behind defaulting atd and sendmail

Patrick O'Callaghan pocallaghan at gmail.com
Fri Sep 5 12:42:10 UTC 2008


On Fri, 2008-09-05 at 01:21 -0500, Michael Cronenworth wrote:
> Are there any legitimate reasons why the "atd" and "sendmail" services 
> are enabled by default? A "default" install is for a desktop and they 
> are quite useless in that regard.
> 
> Sendmail only stores the logwatch output, which actually accumulates 
> after a period of time because no normal desktop user reads the mail. It 
> could possibly fill up a hard drive on a small drive, such as a eeePC 
> 4gb system. I realize we all have terrabyte hard drives now and logwatch 
> is only kilobytes in size, but it's still garbage. Don't get me wrong, I 
> use logwatch mail on Fedora server installs, but for a desktop user... 
> who never reads it...
> 
> As for 'at' well... do *normal* Fedora users have any benefit from this 
> starting up? I realize there is a gnome-schedule utility, but it is not 
> installed by default.
> 
> I'm not trying to start a flamewar. I am just curious.

+1. I haven't used sendmail in over 5 years and have to keep remembering
to turn the damn thing off (servers run postfix, clients talk to port 25
directly).

poc




More information about the fedora-list mailing list