I generally consider my professional persona to be a software guy first and a hardware guy second. My first passion is code, through and through, but I have also spent a good deal of my time performing the day to day office IT stuff and, usually, I have a good time doing it. More than that though; I’ve always found that working on the hardware is a good way to know how my software is going to interact with the hardware. Read: It makes me a better programmer.

Needless to say, I have some ideas about hardware setup and deployment; a philosophy if you will. I try to be pretty humble about it but I couldn’t help but be reminded of this a when, a few weeks ago, I was listening to Stack Overflow podcast #59.

This one was cool; they had Damien Katz on who, if you don’t know, is the creator of CouchDB and used to work on Lotus Notes (back when the Internet didn’t matter). Smart guy.

(BTW, if you don’t know who he is I highly recommend you read his blog. Start with this post called Signs You’re a Crappy Programmer.)

Anyway, like I said; good podcast. Up until the end that is when Joel and Jeff completely blew me away with the following dialog when they were discussing a question on ServerFault about disabling your page file (around 1:01:44 in the podacast):

Joel: There’s a problem that we’ve always had, and it’s more common, I hate to say this, it’s more common among Unix system administrators than Windows system administrators, which is, they get the thing out of the box, they get the operating system out of the box, they install it, and then they’re going to want to do 47 things to that system before they can use it. Mostly removing things that were put there that they don’t understand.

So they have this attitude that’s like, “What are all these services that are running; I’m going to kill all of these services and then my server will be really fast.”

And then, all of a sudden, ok, it works for a while and then you go and install FogBugz, and it doesn’t run because some basic service, that everybody else has, has been removed, severely deleted from the operating system, by some system administrator that thinks they know better but, really doesn’t.

Jeff: You sound really bitter about this.

Joel: I am bitter because it’s all over tech support calls. It comes from people who are like… There is generally a philosophy that security flaws come from things, often come from things, that you don’t even realize you have running. And that probably shouldn’t be running.

I had to rewind the podcast when I heard that part. Was Joel really suggesting that we leave the default services enabled on an operating system? Did I just hear Joel Spolsky imply it was bad to disable and remove unneeded services from a computer?

Yup, I think I did.I also don’t think it’s the best idea to keep the default configuration on a server. Why? Because an OS is released with the goal of a good out of box experience not security. For example, does your Linux web server really need CUPS running? Does your Windows server really need Windows Media Player to start every time you start the thing?

Now I’m totally willing to accept that I’m being naive; this is knowledge gained from experience not instruction. But it’d have to be a compelling argument.

But, to be clear, you disable services and programs, not to improve performance, but to improve security and reliability. (Performance improvement should be a side effect in my opinion.) The thing I think Joel might be missing is that he’s more than likely dealing with some pretty busy system administrators. They probably did something to keep FogBugz from working, and forgot what it was, so they called support.