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.
11 replies for this story:
Adelton wrote: Nonproduct
I assume you've used fedup to upgrade. In that case --product=nonproduct is probably what you wanted.
isimluk wrote: Fedora minimal
To remove unnecesary packages, I maintain fedora-minimal.rpm with various conflicts. https://copr.fedoraproject.org/coprs/isimluk/fedora-minimal/
Yenya wrote: Re: Nonproduct
OK, how can I move an existing system to nonproduct? Is removing fedora-release-server package what I want? Thanks.
Yenya wrote: Re: Fedora minimal
Interesting. I have looked at fedora-minimal, and it looks like sudden outbreak of common sense to me. Thanks and keep up the good work!
Adelton wrote: Re: Nonproduct
That is my understanding -- it's just package dependency thing.
Adelton wrote: Re: Fedora minimal
Nice. I've installed all but four. fedora-minimal-conflicts-gnome conflicts with libxklavier but that is needed by lightdm, xfce4-settings, and xfce4-xkb-plugin -- all things I kinda like. And fedora-minimal-conflicts-anaconda wants to remove pykickstart which I have no problem with except it would take away dnf-plugins-core which sounds a bit hardcore.
Yenya wrote: Re: Nonproduct
Do you know whether a fresh install (as opposed to fedup upgrade) can also be done as "nonproduct"?
isimluk wrote: Re: Fedora minimal
Yenya, Yes. My understanding is that removing fedora-release-server is what you need. Adelton, I'll happily accept patches. pykickstart has been only recently required by dnf-plugins-core. libxklavier is not useful for me, but we could move it out of fedora-minimal-gnome pkg to some other.
Yenya wrote: Fedora No Bullshit?
Maybe we should attempt to create a Fedora spin without this bloat. Fedora Traditional? Fedora No Bullshit? Fedora JustWorks?
Yenya wrote: Re: Fedora No Bullshit?
(replying to myself :-) Fedora Nonproduct? Fedora Core? Fedora Versatile?
petr_p wrote: Re: Nonproduct
Uninstalling fedora-release* will break dependencies probably. Proper way is to have installed exactly on of the fedora-release* packages (e.g. "dnf --allowerasing install fedora-release). See [http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/buildinfo?buildID=637888]. By the way product introduction has already happened in Fedora 21. I recommend reading [https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Upgrading_Fedora_using_yum#Version_specific_notes].