Tracking service utilization

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Good morning,

After taking over a group of 100+ RHEL servers, I'm working through the servers from a PCI perspective to make sure there are no unrequired services running. Rather than post about each individual service, is there a way to determine if the specific services are, in fact, needed for the operation of the server?

Some services that are running/enabled on some servers, but not others are things like atd, kudzu, lm_sensors, mdmonitor, etc. Before stopping them and disabling them, I want to make sure that doing so will cause no harm, but I'm unsure how to verify that there are no users/processes that actually use these services.

Anyone got any tips or suggestions as to how I can determine whether or not it is safe to disable services?

Responses

Interesting question, Dan. I've shared this one on the Red Hat Support social media channels. Hopefully the community can help you out with some tips soon.

Thanks, David.

I do think this has some significant value as many enterprises are required to adhere to things such as PCI or SOX regulations and in most cases, even without these requirements, it is good practice to disable services that are not required. Without a good way to identify which services are actually being used legitimately, I think this puts admins in a position to either err on the side of caution and leave those services running (thereby NOT following such good practices for both potential security reasons as well as unnecessarily using system resources) or to risk possibly causing unwanted downtime as a way of "testing" whether or not a given service is being used.

Interested to hear what might come out of that.

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