Managing the Startup of Unixy Services

June 1, 2007 - 10:20am

neko.eth0@gmail.com asks:

Question

How can I completly disable the Finger Service? Instead of manually creating .nofinger files on each user Home folder.

Thanks!

Answer

Well, for starters, it’s not on by default. You had to have turned it on (or some software did) for it to even be active. That said, the service tool can turn it off.

$ sudo service finger stop

The tool can also control any launchd or inetd service:

$ sudo service --list
smtp
fax-receive
bootps
com.apple.KernelEventAgent
com.apple.atrun
com.apple.dashboard.advisory.fetch
com.apple.dnbobserver
com.apple.dnbvolunteer
com.apple.mDNSResponder
com.apple.nibindd
com.apple.periodic-daily
com.apple.periodic-monthly
com.apple.periodic-weekly
com.apple.portmap
com.apple.syslogd
com.apple.xgridagentd
com.apple.xgridcontrollerd
com.vix.cron
comsat
distccd
eppc
exec
finger
ftp
login
nmbd
ntalk
org.isc.named
org.postfix.master
org.xinetd.xinetd
printer
shell
smbd
ssh
swat
telnet
tftp

About Adam Knight

Location
Austin, TX

Home page/site
http://www.hopelessgeek.com/

Author Biography

Adam Knight is one of the founders of Mac Geekery and is a geek at heart. Programmer by day, hacker by night, his daily life revolves around the Macintosh platform, which he has been a user and programmer for since the early days of System 7 when his LCII replaced his Apple //c.

In-between tech jobs, he’s managed to learn the basics of any web hacker: PHP, MySQL, Perl, Apache, Linux, *BSD, and the intricacies of ./configure —prefix=~/bombshelter/. Today, codepoet is concentrating on blogging again, writing some software for the Mac by himself (including Notae) and for his company (such as Photonic) and has a few other toys coming out soon.

Bug him over AIM or email [link fixed].

View full user profile

Printer-friendly version

July 5, 2007 - 1:07pm

Anonymous said

Wait… telnet is running by default? That doesn’t sound wise. Could you clarify?

flag this

July 7, 2007 - 12:03am

Adam Knight said

telnet is an option. Those are installed services, not running services.

flag this

January 16, 2008 - 7:09am

apple said

Do there can any GUI tools to do this, like putty, implementation of Telnet and SSH for Win32 and Unix platforms, along with an xterm terminal emulator. Thanks.