[wplug] running "lean"

[Duncan Hutty]

at http://www.tldp.org/guides.html and probably other fine locations you can find Securing & Optimizing Linux by Gerhard Mourani.

It gives a lot of information that is focussed on cutting out unnecessary services (& other things) as the means to obtain better security (less exploitable software) and better performance (less bloat taking up resources).

As a necessary requirement he includes a lot of information about what each item is, so you can decide whether you need it or not.

He is focussed on RH but mostly this applies to most distros, the only thing that you want to be aware of is how your distro starts/stops a particular service (sysv startup scripts, superservers such as inetd/xinetd or something else.

There's a newer (dead tree) version for purchase as well.

As an alternative, and I'm not sure this is what you really want to hear, you could go through the install for Linux From Scratch/Beyond Linux From Scratch and then you'll find out what everything is for.

-- 
Duncan Hutty