“In the traditional UNIX® world, the roles of the user and
system administrator are rigidly defined and are separated by the
simple fact that members of the former group lack the privileges
needed to perform the tasks of the latter. Linux®, however, is
bringing UNIX to the home workstation and, in so doing, is blurring
this distinction. Many Linux users do their own system
administration and must, therefore, do their own “taming” of the
many Linux “daemons.”
“To the ancient Greeks, a daemon was a protective spirit
that presided over a person’s destiny. In UNIX circles, however,
daemon stands for Disk And Execution MONitor. Daemons are server
processes that are responsible for offering certain services.
They run in the background and generally lie dormant until a
process-either local or remote-calls upon them.”
“An important task for any Linux system administrator is the
selection, installation and maintenance of daemons. This task can
be simplified to some degree.”