Yenya's World

Mon, 14 Sep 2015

Service Bloat

I have (finally) upgraded my home workstation/server/router to Fedora 22. Newer Fedora releases have an anti-feature called "product": one cannot simply install "Fedora", the "Fedora Product", such as Fedora Workstation, should be selected first. For a system with X session (two X sessions, in my case), "Fedora Workstation" seems to be a natural choice. It is not: "Fedora Workstation" can be translated from Fedora Newspeak to an ordinary English as "Fedora GNOME 3". So this is a no-go.

A time ago, I came across a suggestion that "Fedora Server" is probably the closest thing to former "Fedora". So I upgraded my home box to "Fedora Server". Today, after a routine inspection of open ports on my home server, I discovered that something is listening on port 9090 on INADDR_ANY (and IN6ADDR_ANY as well). One fuser -n tcp, and I discovered that the listening process is called cockpit-ws.

Digging further into it, it seems that this is a web-based administrative interface (do you remember linuxconf, anyone?), probably another futile attempt to encapsulate the strength of all the configuration files to some useless web-based interface. Moreover, it cannot be uninstalled, as it depends on the fedora-release-server package. A side note: the cockpit-ws package contains font files, which is probably against Fedora Font Packaging Guidelines.

I wonder what happened to the "no unnecessary services should be enabled by default" philosophy. It seems that Cockpit is a blatant example of an unnecessary service, which is not only installed by default, but also enabled by default in Fedora Server 22. I recommend to run the following commands:

# systemctl stop cockpit.socket
# systemctl disable cockpit.socket

What other kinds of service-bloat did you find on your computers? Watch for newly opened ports after Fedora upgrades.

Section: /computers (RSS feed) | Permanent link | 11 writebacks

About:

Yenya's World: Linux and beyond - Yenya's blog.

Links:

RSS feed

Jan "Yenya" Kasprzak

The main page of this blog

Categories:

Archive:

Blog roll:

alphabetically :-)