Reasons behind defaulting atd and sendmail

[Timothy Murphy]

Tim wrote:

> 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 may do that.

But my basic thought is that there is very little, if any, security risk
on my laptop, which is separated from the internet by my desktop.
On the other hand, stopping a service might have some unforeseen effect;
and since I have many little problems whose cause I have not established
I don't want to introduce any possible complications.

Also I assume if They start a service by default
They must have some reason to do that.

-- 
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