nixCraft

Hi,

I'd like to clean up one of my servers. I see many users and groups that serve no purpose on my server. I use this server for mail, imap, pop, smtp, http, https, ssh, ftp and that's about it.

Out of these users:

9 news /etc/news news OK
10 uucp /var/spool/uucp /sbin/nologin uucp OK
11 operator /root /sbin/nologin operator OK
12 games /usr/games /sbin/nologin games OK
13 gopher /var/gopher /sbin/nologin gopher OK
14 ftp /var/ftp /sbin/nologin FTP User OK
28 nscd / /sbin/nologin NSCD Daemon OK
32 rpc / /sbin/nologin Portmapper RPC user

and these groups:

13 news news OK
14 uucp uucp OK
15 man OK
19 floppy OK
20 games
30 gopher gopher

will it be safe to remove gopher, games and news (both users and group?

No you don't have to remove them and they are not useless. These users or groups used by Linux services or daemons internally as well as to start service.

If you remove them most services won’t start.

Also note that all these users are locked in CentOS by default and they cannot login
Using /sbin/nologin shell.

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OK, so which daemons are using users games, news, gopher then?
On my system they serve no purpose other than being listed.

If they are not part of your system you can remove the same. Make sure you backup password and shadow file in case if you need them again.

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