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What daemons/services should be enabled?


paddymac

Question

When I install software from Portage, sometimes the software includes a daemon of some sort (a script is install in /etc/init.d/ ). Some ebuilds will automatically create proper users and groups and also add the service to the proper runlevel. But other ebuilds install the script yet do nothing else. The don't provide any output to inform the user, the don't create users or groups, they don't enable the service; they don't do anything useful.

 

So after I've installed a bit of software on a new system, if I run 'rc-update -v', I'll get a list of installed services. Some are enabled, but I'll also see a long list of services that are not enabled. The problem is that I may not know whether these are services that I should manually add or not. And if I should, I may not know the proper runlevel. It's usually default, but maybe it should be on the boot runlevel or something else. Or is it a service that is called by some other program on an as-needed basis and should be left alone? I may not even know what the service does.

 

So I think there ought to be a good wiki page for Funtoo that discusses the various system services that may be installed on a typical system. Ideally, they should all be documented, but at least the ones that are likely to be found on most systems should be documented. I've been using Linux for over a decade, and there are still some that I haven't a clue what they do. I know I generally want to enable avahi-daemon, avahi-dnsconfd, consolekit, dbus, fbcondecor, gpm, lm_sensors, and xdm, for example, but there is an even longer list of daemons that are not enabled by default and I don't know whether I need them or not.

 

Here's a partial listing: alsasound, bluetooth, busybox-ntpd, busybox-watchdog, consolefont, cups-browsed, cupsd, dhcpcd, dhcpd, dhcrelay, dhcrelay6, dmcrypt, dmeventd, fancontrol, fuse, git-daemon, hddtemp, ip6tables, iptables, lvm-monitoring, lvmetad, mtadm, mdraid, numlock, osclock, pciparm, pwcheck, pydoc-2.7, pydoc-3.3, rfcomm, rsyncd, s6-svscan, saslauthd, svnserve, swclock, wpa_supplicant, xdm-setup.

 

A handful of these I might have a vague idea what they do. Some are completely mysterious.

 

So does anyone else have any thoughts to share?

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