Services

[Mike A. Harris]

On Wed, 15 Oct 2003, Mattias Dahlberg wrote:

>> Saving 0.02 seconds during boot time isn't worth the effort for
>> isdn at least.
>
>Ok.
>
>> How exactly?  I'm not sure that makes any sense.  On a fresh OS
>> installation, I expect to be able to ssh to that machine over the
>> network, and to do so without editing any ssh config files.
>
>You're right. But maybe it's an example of a service that could be off by
>default and if you need it you simply use redhat-config-services and put a
>checkmark in front of it.
>
>But of course, if a service takes zero seconds to start, has no
>noticable memory foot print and could never cause security
>problems it makes no sense to remove it from the startup.

As you say, if there are no security implications for leaving a
service enabled, and if that service starts in 0.02 seconds, then
it is a convenience feature to enable it.  In many cases,
enabling such services doesn't even consume any memory as the
script runs and exits without starting anything.  This is a case
where leaving this service on all the time purposefully has real
world benefit for users of ISDN, as they don't have to take extra
steps to enable a service that there is no real world benefit of
us not enabling by default.

Even if some services do start a daemon or whatnot that isn't 
actually used, in most cases the memory usage is quite 
negligible, and if the service isn't ever used, it'll end up 
getting swapped out over time anyway.  No loss even on machines 
that just barely meet our minimum system requirements.

-- 
Mike A. Harris     ftp://people.redhat.com/mharris
OS Systems Engineer - XFree86 maintainer - Red Hat