GNOME2 - avahi daemons and various ports.

[Michal Varga]

On Mon, 2011-10-17 at 12:47 +0200, ian ivy wrote:
> Hi, a couple days ago I decided to test GNOME2,
> because I have one stand-alone machine with
> FreeBSD 8.2 for testing various things. Lite* version
> was installed from the 8 Stable branch. My questions is:
> 
> A) do I need enable avahi daemon to properly
> run GNOME2? The same question goes for avahi
> mDNS daemon

No, not at all.

Only thing you need to be running is dbus, and optionally HAL for a few
additional features (CD insertion autodetection and such), but that's
somewhat controversial subject, as HAL is crap and basically abandoned.


> B) it is normal that some services (?) are listening
> on various ports?
> 

Probably not, I don't have gnome-session listening in both Gnome 2, nor
Gnome 3. But no idea where your behavior might come from.


> It is normal behaviour? If I can close/disable these ports,
> how do this?

I'd go for pf in case you're concerned about external connections.

See man pf, man pfctl, and the Handbook:
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/firewalls-pf.html


> * gnome2-lite-2.32.1
> ** - I do not use IPv6. It is normal (tcp6)?

Yes, even if you don't use ipv6 in practical sense, as long as it's
there, services binding on *.* will bind to your ipv6 addresses too
(usually loopback). It's harmless, but in case you want to block ipv6
completely, just use a quick rule in pf and nothing will get through:

block quick inet6

(No further pf rules will get evaluated for inet6.)

m.


-- 
Michal Varga,
Stonehenge (Gmail account)