Disabling unwanted services in RedHat Linux

In developing this script, I first disabled all services on the system until I was sure they were all gone (except for a few core system daemons which are mentioned in the script itself).

This script is intended to be copied to /root/select_services (or some other location) on each machine and run after initial install, any package upgrade using rpm, any system upgrade, or when you change what services you want to enable. You should edit the script to reflect your choices of which services will be enabled. The script will maintain /etc/inetd.conf and all the links in /etc/rc.d/rc*.d/.

Be warned that anytime you upgrade a package using rpm, it will probably be reenabled if you had disabled that service; that is why I recommend running this script after every rpm upgrade. This script will not know about any new packages installed which are not part of one of the tested full installs (i.e. Redhat 4.0, 5.0) unless you add them.

RedHat 5.0 finally added an install screen to allow you to specify which services were to be enabled. This is a good step that many of us have been asking for for quite some time; however I still prefer my script since it is known to prevent upgrade induced regression if used according to instructions, preserves the information about how a package was normally intended to be started if you decide to enable it later, is a simple text file which can easily be copied, edited, distributed, logged, and printed, and it can be run at any time, not merely at install time. The redhat service selection screen only appears during an install and only a first time install, at that. It does not appear if you are upgrading RedHat or package versions.