[CentOS] Processes to disable

Mon Apr 13 10:02:32 UTC 2009
Filipe Brandenburger <filbranden at gmail.com>

Hello,

On Thu, Apr 9, 2009 at 10:21, David Lemcoe <forum at lemcoe.com> wrote:
> a bunch of processes that really aren't needed

Yes, many processes started in a default installation are not needed,
but they are not harmful at all, and in most cases they will not bring
you any problems.

On the other hand, if you start disabling processes, you might get
into trouble and not know exactly why. So, especially if you are *not*
a more experienced CentOS user, I would advise you against disabling
processes that you do not know if you need or not. As I said, if you
don't really need them, they will probably not be harmful to you.

> and just burn up processes.

This is a very silly argument, it's not like you have a low limit of
total number of processes in your system, and so far I have never seen
anyone reach that limit.

> Which ones should I get rid of for just a webserver? MySQL server?

If you do not plan to run MySQL server on a machine, then yes, you
should disable it, but in that case you should not even have installed
the RPM package to start with. In that case, the way I would advise
you to disable it is to uninstall the RPM.

On Thu, Apr 9, 2009 at 16:29, Bogdan Nicolescu <bo2k2 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> to disable/enable a service:
> chkconfig --level <levels> service-name off/on
> i.e.
> chkconfig --level 3 sshd off
> Disables sshd for levels 3
> chkconfig --level 35 sshd on
> Enables sshd for level 3 and 5

Never use the --level argument unless you have very specific needs.

You should use:

chkconfig sshd off

And:

chkconfig sshd on

The service initialization files have a list of "default" runlevels,
which will probably make more sense than anything you specify.

> To see the names of all the services installed on your system:
> ls /etc/rc.d/init.d

Using 'chkconfig --list' makes more sense than listing the init.d directory.

HTH,
Filipe