SBN - Baseline Server Notes

Eliminating Extraneous Stuff

There's an awful lot of stuff installed by default with Mint that you'll probably never use (or even know exists...) on a desktop install.

On a server, moreso...

For a full list of installed packages:

apt list --installed

Here's my (likely incomplete) list for Mint 19.2:

• brltty
• dcraw
• espeak
• gimp
• gnome-calendar
• hexchat
• ideviceinstaller
• imagemagick
• inxi
• libreoffice
• mobile-broadband-provider-info
• modemmanager
• nvidia-prime-applet
• plymouth   (seems to want to remove cinnamon with it...)
• pulseaudio   (seems to want to remove cinnamon with it...)
• redshift
• rhythmbox
• simple-scan
• streamer   (seems to want to remove cinnamon with it...)
• thunderbird
• tomboy
• transmission
• ure   (don't add * to this one...)
• xplayer

To find out what a particular package actually is,  you can use:

apt show PACKAGENAME

To get rid of a package:

apt remove PACKAGENAME*

My minimum one-liner:

apt remove brltty* dcraw* espeak* gimp* gnome-calendar* hexchat* ideviceinstaller* imagemagick* libreoffice* mobile-broadband-provider-info* modemmanager* nvidia-prime-applet* redshift* rhythmbox* simple-scan* thunderbird* tomboy* transmission* ure xplayer*

I have ABSOLUTELY no doubt there's still a shitload of stuff that could be profitably removed.

Remote Access

Install & enable sshd

sudo apt install openssh-server

Note: When you try to ssh into a machine that has moved you'll probably see errors like: "Warning: the ECDSA host key for 'foobar' differs from the key for the IP address '192.168.0.66'"

ssh-keygen -R 192.168.0.66

Will erase that address from the known-hosts file and allow you to start clean