How to keep unnecessary processes from starting

[Charles Howse]

On Mar 10, 2009, at 7:45 PM, Derek Broughton wrote:

> Charles Howse wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>> I have 8.10-server-i386 running in command-line only.
>> Surely some of the processes below are unnecessary.
>> What's the best way to separate the wheat from the chaff?
>>
>
> As Brian says, one person's wheat is another's chaff, but as near as  
> I can
> tell, since you have pop3-login tasks under dovecot, you _are_  
> running a
> mail server and so the only unnecessary tasks you have are at least  
> 5 of
> the 6 gettys - those are the consoles waiting for someone to login -  
> and
> possibly proftpd.  Since you're accessing the server from ssh, 1  
> console is
> probably enough (actually, one console is almost _always_ enough,  
> but they
> take so few resources).  And since you're accessing the server from  
> ssh,
> you should have on-demand sftp, so if it's just you you don't really  
> need
> proftpd, and if it's others you might prefer them to use sftp anyway  
> (more
> secure).

Thanks for the input Derek.

I had completely forgotten about sftp!  That's a great tip.  I can  
uninstall ProFtpd now.

Now, here's something I may have gone about all wrong.  I use FreeBSD  
on my webserver, which comes with /usr/bin/mail by default.  I use  
that and sendmail (installed by default) to send mail in scripts, and  
retrieve it from my Mac using a lightweight pop3 app called qpopper.   
I don't do *any* mail outside the box.
Since 'mail' isn't installed by default, I installed mailutils, which  
installed Exim4.  I read a little about Exim, couldn't find a howto to  
set it up as a pop server, so I installed Dovecot as a pop server  
(crazy hard for me).
IIRC, sendmail wasn't difficult to set up to send local mail in  
FreeBSD, so I wonder if I could use sendmail in Intrepid, and  
uninstall Dovecot and Exim?
Does that make sense?