...on his average home PC?

I searched this forum and Google for a good overview over the various services, but I really didn't find anything of value. Could anyone here point me to such a "service overview"? Or just tell me whether I need an ACPI daemon or a NFS daemon or a SSH daemon or some of the other stuff below?

These are the currently executable scripts in /etc/rc.d: 4, 6, acpid, alsa, cups, font.sample, hotplug, inet(1|2|d), K, keymap, local, M, modules, modules.new(?), nfsd, S, serial, sshd, syslog, sysvinit, yp

Well as most annoying advice goes, it all depends.

ACPI is the “Advanced Configuration & Power Interface”, this can be very useful for laptops and the like, and it is a little less useful for desktops.

NFS is the “Network File System”, unless you plan on hosting shared folders for other systems, then you will likely not need this service.

SSH is “Secure Shell”, you will only need to run the daemon if you want this computer to respond to SSH request from other computers. If you do not want to allow this access then you will want to disable this services. Note you do not need to run this daemon in order to SSH from this box to another.

CUPS provides printing services, if you have a printer that you would like to use, you may well want this service. If you have decided that you do not want to be responsible for the brutal death of any trees, then disabling this service might be for you.

One thing that I like to suggest, is that from time to time you should run 'nmap' on your own system to see what ports respond. If any ports respond that you are not expecting you should determine what is listening and make a decision if you want it to be listening.

Also, you may want to consider running a firewall, either software or hardware, this is especially true if you are running your box on a always-on internet connection (i.e. Cable or DSL).

Good Luck,

Thanks for the reply kvedaa, I now disabled the SSH, ACPI and NFS daemons. CUPS is still getting started at boot though, sorry! :-)

Ah, and diff tells me rc.modules and rc.modules.new are identical, so I'm gonna make modules.new unexecutable too. (I think it was there since I upgraded to 2.4.26)