On Tue, 2006-06-06 at 13:23 -0400, Sam Drinkard wrote:
Ed Morrison wrote:
Hello Everyone:
I inherited a CentOS 4.x box that appears to have been installed with the everything installation option. I would like to strip the box down of all the unnecessary apps and streamline/secure it. Unfortunately, it is a production box and it would be quite inconvenient to burn down and rebuild. Does anyone have any suggestions on how to do this conveniently with yum and still leave the box in a production condition i.e. leave it's needed services up and running?
Thanks, Ed
Ed,
I'd venture to guess, the first thing would be to identify what youdon't need, stop the processes that you don't need to run, then use yum to remove the stuff, or just stop the processes and don't worry about the software being on the disk unless you really need the space. Determining what you don't really need or have to have would be the hardest task, I'm sure, but there might be some dependencies that bite you along the way as well.
"Strange Days Have Found Us" - Jim Morrison. Why, just recently I was involved in a thread that asked if it would be reasonable to ask yum to tell us what depends on package X. Is that what we need here?
I was thinking of posting a request for that enhancement to Yum. It should be simple to implement, based on the following, which might be useful to the OP here. The only reply was negative, sort of.
If you pick a package to remove, yum will produce a list of all the things that will be removed with it due to dependencies. When it's done, you may reply "Yes" remove that stuff or "No", don't do so.
This is exactly what we need from Yum in a new feature that protects us from the accidental erroneous entry of "Yes". Same code, cut off at the knees so that removal can never actually occur.
Regardless, the OP might make use of this. All OP has to do is remember to ... "JUST SAY NO!" *every* time. I was doing this and almost hit enter after typing "Y". It would have been a catastrophe.
Sam
HTH