Well, my question is self-explanatory, is it ok to disable rc.messagebus / rc.hald on a server box (no X, no physical monitor, just pure power cable and network cable). The only thing I might ever manually mount is a flash drive / cdrom to burn some data on it and that does not happen every day so I can live with manual mounting.

Would it also cause any problems with cdrecord as well?

Thanks,


robot

You specifically mentioned a server box, but I don't see why you can't disable those services. I have two old boxes I run occasionally, both running Slackware 12.1, and I do not use messagebus, udev, or hald. For my network configuration I use the old rc.netdevice script. The boxes are old and the hardware static, therefore I really do not need those services running. I'm no server expert, but I suspect as your box hardware is static you might not need those services.

It is quite hardware static (yet quite modern, p4 1.8ghz), the only thing I might ever add is more hard drive space, and that'll be only an ide drive (no sata support on the box, kinda pointless though for a home server).

I'm just asking around to see if it will give me any problems later on when I need to burn a data cd. I'm going to keep them installed, but just chmod -x the rc.* files. It seems kind of pointless to run them as not much is going to be happening hardware-wise, plus I'm trying to lower the number of services running.

I don't have those services running on my Slack workstation, and I have had zero problems with anything through several hardware upgrades. I just have to manually mount temporary filesystems and manually adjust /etc/fstab as needed. So for sure you shouldn't need them on a server.

Ah thank you for input. I think I will go on with disabling them then.

hmm do all apllications work fine without DBus running on your workstation ? I would have thought audacious, kde etc. etc. would come into a mess ...

If you run server without KDE or Gnome, you shouldn't have much problems. I think XFCE can work nicely without dbus. Didn't try though.

If you run it without GUI, you shouldn't have any problems, just remember to manually add removable media entries in /etc/fstab.

If you use GUI, dbus-hal combination can make system monitoring a bit easier. You'll have a live data about network availabilty and system changes.

Or you can manually compile KDE 3.5.x to work without DBUS. Fetch the build scripts from the official servers and change configure options, if you need KDE on the server.

BTW, GNOME doesn't work without dbus.

for a server, I know it doesn't matter ...

I am curious how lstamm makes a workstation work without dbus .. won't that be painful .. ?

On my two old boxes with static hardware, I do not have dbus, udev, or messagebus enabled. I have noticed no issues with KDE or Xfce. I can play audio files with Amarok and DVD movie ISO images through my network using Xfce and KDE. The old boxes are comparatively slow, but no issues related to dbus, udev, or messagebus that I am aware.

I don't have kde nor audacious installed, so I can't say much about them. Most of my work is done within emacs, and I tend to use command line utilities for multimedia playback. I do use UUIDs for identifying my various USB accessories in /etc/fstab, and have created aliases in .bashrc to mount/unmount them with just a couple of keystrokes.

My workstation is used for graphics editing, audio analysis and editing, document creation, and as a doorway to several networks that I manage. I really haven't found any hindrances in getting rid of dbus and hal, although I realize not everybody would wish to use their computers like me.

K, I seem to have no problems as of right now without d-bus/hald running. Trimmed down few not useful processes that way

Thanks all.

Now back to trimming down the kernel :\