Reasons behind defaulting atd and sendmail

[Tim]

On Tue, 2008-09-09 at 16:06 +0200, Timothy Murphy wrote:
> 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.

This sort of thing is a frequently asked question, and less frequently
answered question.  Post a query in a more appropriate separate thread
about pruning off unnecessary services, and you'll do yourself, and a
few others, quite a favour with the answers you receive.

I've turned off things based on the descriptions, and knowing that I
don't make use of what they offer.  There's been the odd one or two
thing, over time, that I've not been sure about.

One thing that I don't get is why we have the NFS4 services installed,
and many of its parts on by default, but nothing seems to use them, by
default (e.g. autofs).

-- 
[tim at localhost ~]$ uname -r
2.6.25.14-108.fc9.i686

Don't send private replies to my address, the mailbox is ignored.  I
read messages from the public lists.