Granularity of popularity [LWN.net]

Granularity of popularity

Posted Apr 12, 2008 16:07 UTC (Sat) by Richard_J_Neill (subscriber, #23093)
In reply to: Granularity of popularity by dmarti
Parent article: RSA: Security Experts Debate Linux Vs. Microsoft (ChannelWeb)

I'm not convinced by this. Of course you shouldn't leave services running if you don't need
them, but you don't have to uninstall the binary. (And yes, our production server does run
portmap - it tends to be rather useful when the fileserver is NFS!)

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Granularity of popularity

Posted Apr 14, 2008 22:44 UTC (Mon) by phiggins (subscriber, #5605) [Link]

If one of those binaries is setuid root, then you'll surely wish you had uninstalled it after
someone exploits it. There are other reasons to not have unnecessary programs installed, such
as a compiler.