Manage System Services On Fedora

While working on your Fedora Linux desktop it is very important to maintain security for the system. One of the easiest ways to do this is to carefully manage access to your system services. Everyone is different because each Fedora system may be used for a different purpose or purposes. If you have a service that is not being used you must turn it off so that you may minimize your systems exposure to possible bugs. Although many different methods exist to manage system services today we will review how to use the Services Configuration Tool. To run this you must be using the X Window System and have root privilages. The Services Configuration Tool can be accessed by clicking on the Gnome main menu. Select System --- Administration --- Services.

This will open the Service Configuration window where we can manage our system services. Across the top of the window you see seven large icons allowing us to enable a service, disable a service, customize it, start, stop, restart, or get help with the Service Configuration Tool. On the left we see a list of services along with important icons that help us decipher what the current state of each service is. A service that is enabled shows a green icon next to it. A disabled service (like httpd, the one i've selected) is shown by a red icon next to it while a service enabled in run levels 3, 4, and 5 is indicated by the switch box icon. The next column also shows icons including a question mark which means the status is unknown, a unplugged plug which means the service is stopped, and a plugged in plug which indicated the service is running. After clicking on a particular service the details are shown on the right.

In my case i do not run a web server off of my Fedora  machine so i can safely select the httpd service and click on the Disable icon across the top of the window to disable it. If a service is running and you want to stop it click on the Stop icon across the top of the screen.