Krazy Kubuntu Annoyances - page 3

Will All the Helpful Daemons Please Just Go Away?

I wonder if the various 'buntu teams ever talk to each other. The 'buntus have been weird about network printing from the beginning. It's disabled by default, and the graphical configurators don't work right. And yet Avahi-daemon, the Zeroconf network discovery daemon, runs by default even though there is nothing for it to auto-discover, so it's virtually useless. (Hey, how about discovering network printers? Except CUPS already broadcasts printers, when it's not handcuffed.) Not only that, but I find it interfering with all manner of functions. For one example, if there are no network interfaces configured, it will create a link-local address. This is a cute surprise when you don't want Ethernet enabled at all. You can disable Avahi, or even remove it if you wish; don't be scared when it wants to uninstall kde-desktop too. This is a meta-package, so it's safe to remove it.

Bluetooth is on by default, even though a minority of users need it. Way more users want to share printing than want to auto-discover nothing or use Bluetooth devices. Ubuntu boasts about being very secure, yet having unneeded services running violates the most fundamental security principle, which is "deny all, allow as needed". Managing services is easy, because both Ubuntu and Kubuntu have nice pointy-clicky graphical services configurators. In fact the first thing all Linux users should do after installation is turn off all unneeded services, and with the overly-helpful 'buntu families, you better check after every update too.

Resources

• Bug #189369, Kubuntu Gutsy "network settings" does not save settings, interfaces come up when they shouldn't, with links to two related bug reports from 2006 that apparently need to age a few more years before they can be fixed
  
• Zeroconf
• Bluetooth Security