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?
Ed, I just had to do this with a couple of boxes. A tip I would offfer is the command "yum list extras" which helped immensely in finding any packages that had been installed by previous admin without the benefit of the whole yum/repository system.
Other steps I used were to do a chkconfig --list | grep ":on" to see what was set to start and then examining the run scripts to determine whether all services were part of a package or not.
Last, check the /etc/rc.local in case they compiled an app and installed it manually. Many times people will install their startup commands in it if they are unfamiliar with chkconfig etc.
Good Luck,
Alex Palenschat