[Sunhelp] Solaris 7 pointers

[Dale Ghent]

On Sun, 13 Feb 2000 sunhelp at orn.net wrote:

| I am concerned about Solaris security, especially since the boxes seem to
| want to have X running by default.  If these are just mail and webservers,
| can I disable X without causing any problems?  I installed the MU2 cdrom
| also, but I was wondering how I can find out which patches are avaiable
| from Sun which I might want to install.  Is there a tool for this?

By default, Solaris starts up alot of arguably useless services. Yes, you
can disable X, and it's the first thing I do when installing a new Solaris
machine. The command:

/usr/dt/bin/dtconfig -d

Will disable the startup of X. I also recommend going through inetd.conf
and disabling the services you know you have no use for, and going through
/etc/rc2.d and /etc/rc3.d and disabling those services you dont need as
well (rename the files so that they have a small "s" instead of a
uppercased one to prevent them from being ran on bootup.)

MU2 (Maintenence Update 2) is rather old, and the latest is MU4, which
brings things up to a pretty current state (11/99 equivalency.) MU4 can be
had at access1.sun.com. There is also the Recommended patchset, that is
freely available from sunsolve:

ftp://sunsolve.sun.com/pub/patches/7_Recommended.zip

Install MU4 first, then the Recommended cluster.

/dale