I recently did a full install of Mandrake 9.2 - that is I installed it with all the components including servers and etc.. I figured that even though I do not need these things right this minute, eventually I will want to play around with them...

However, I'm still much off a newb, and I'm not sure which processes and services are which. Is there are a list of server related processes I definitely do not need to run in the background by default? I'm concerned that all these things I istalled are happilly running on my machine all the time hugging cpu, and posing security threat... I just want to disable everything server related and just have a plain workstation - but still have these things avaliable later on, if I decide to use them...

Also - are there any critical patches I need to apply to a straight-out-of the box Mandrake 9.2?

Thanks!

You can do a "ps -ef" to see what is currently running. I havn't installed Mandrake in a very long time so I don't know what they have starting by default.

I disable all

httpd
nfs
smb
rpc
xinetd
etc...

You can do a "netstat -anp" and it will show you all the tcp/udp ports that are currently open to the inet then you can disable them. Always update your system right out of the box. Fedora core 2 that came out earlier this week already has updates.