Most of the linux machines around here are currently redhat or fedora, so most of what I have to say is related to these. It seems that every time I install something I have to look in /etc/rc.d/rc3.d to be sure it didn't install something I didn't want there. It's one thing that just because I asked the install program at insatllation that I wanted everything installed; but it's another that I _don't_ want all of those daemons running. I just want the programs installed, I'll decide when they'll run :) This brings me to the cron stuff. Files and directories to watch out for/modify in /etc: crontab cron.d/ cron.hourly/ cron.daily/ cron.weekly/ cron.monthly/ These places sure can be full of extra garbage if not cleaned up after an install. I don't see any pressing need to have anything run from cron.hourly on the machines around here; so I have nothing running there. Same with cron.weekly and cron.monthly. Once a day starting at 7AM when I can't possibly be awake, the cron jobs happen in the order that I want them to sight unseen. Most of the startup times(or whether things start at all) can be set up in the crontab file. Sometimes I modify the contents of the above directories to suite my needs instead. The only other thing I look out for are things in the cron.d/ like sysstat, which I also tweak the times on if I leave it on at all. Tracey.