Reasons behind defaulting atd and sendmail

[Timothy Murphy]

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.

-- 
Timothy Murphy  
e-mail: gayleard /at/ eircom.net
tel: +353-86-2336090, +353-1-2842366
s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland