Hi all.

I have dabbled with RedHat 8.0, 9 and Fedora Core 1 as they have been released and despite what I read my experience is that they are still quite slow booting up, and application start up time is significantly slower than when I have WinXP on the very same box. I have also read that some tweaking needs to be done in order to really see performance better, and so I tried disabling certain unrequired services at startup.

It was while doing this that I noticed, despite during a Custom install deselecting the entire Server package list, that sendmail is intstalled.

My question is, what is it? Do I really need it? And worse still, why is it installed and enabled by default? Is this desired behaviour? Or is it a bug?

Thanks for all your help.

Also, a URL where I can find out what all these services are and what will be the effect of disabling them would be absolutely helpful.

Justin.

Usually sendmail will be installed and activated by default to allow internal mail only. For example all logs generated by syslog are usually mailed to root. You can turn off sendmail with the only side effect being that logs will no longer be mailed to root (this will generate error messages in /var/log/maillog). However, the default sendmail configuration is setup to only allow internal mail and outgoing mail, but shouldn't allow incoming mail.

I haven't really seen a good page the describes all the services and the effect of shutting them off. However, the Redhat documentation does describe most of them pretty well. You can also find pretty good info by searching here or at google for the the individual services.

Keep in mind that Linux boots up completly before allowing you to login...Windows still boots stuff in the background after a login prompt.