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I have just upgraded my Debian VPS webserver from 6 to 7 and among others I have just found the following services running:

named
xinetd
sendmail-mta
(...)
kthreadd/478
khelper/478

What is the NameD Service for ? Is it safe to uninstall ?

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    RTFM: man named – HBruijn Oct 23 '14 at 14:11
  • This is sooo unbelievably lazy. – ewwhite Oct 23 '14 at 14:32
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    I am just wondering why other users with similar questions have the opposite feedback: serverfault.com/questions/441618/linux-is-an-mta-required – Jack Oct 23 '14 at 14:45
  • The heart of the question doesn't seem to me to be the same as the linked question, but this type of explanation is not appropriate here and should be taken to meta.serverfault.com – squillman Oct 23 '14 at 15:19
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    @Jack IMHO The question would have been a lot more like the one you linked to when it showed some minimal research e.g. from a quick search in the manual or online I understand it is the ISC DNS server... That could be followed by more valid question if it is required for normal operation when you don't run a DNS service. You might ask if named is required for DNS lookups by your system. (normally it is not :-) An alternate question might even be if it has merit to run named only for use by your own server. (I can think of some special use-cases). – HBruijn Oct 24 '14 at 10:06
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The named service on Debian is an Internet Domain Name Server. It is part of the Bind9 distribution from the ISC DHCP Server. Read more about the named demon on the Debian Bind9 Website or in the man page for named:

named is a Domain Name System (DNS) server, part of the BIND 9 distribution from ISC. For more information on the DNS, see RFCs 1033, 1034, and 1035.

If you don't need any DNS/DHCP service on your computer, it is safe to uninstall it. If you need such a service, I wouldn't recommend stopping or uninstalling named.

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