4

Since upgrade 12.04 LTS I noted this process because it's giving errors on startup and shutdown:

unable to stat gdomap

What is gdomap? What is it used for? Can be safely removed? How?

jasmines
  • 11,011

2 Answers2

8

What Is gdomap?

gdomap is a daemon used by GNUstep programs. GNUstep is a framework for building applications that adheres to the OpenStep API specifications.

Is it safe to disable/remove gdomap?

Richard Frith-Macdonald stated the following in 2010:

The gdomap deamon is completely unused for most applications! I don't think any GNUstep applications use it in normal operation (ie if you haven't given them command-line options to tell them to communicate between different hosts/users). The vast majority of DO connections are private to a single user on a single machine and use message ports (implemented as unix domain sockets or as message queues on mswindows) and they don't need/use a namesperver as name information is written to the local filesystem (or windows registry).

I don't know if every application using the gdomap daemon has to register a name, but I listed the registered applications and found nothing:

$ gdomap -N
No names currently registered with gdomap

I also listed to see what other applications listed gnustep as a dependency and only found gnustep-games:

$ sudo apt-cache rdepends gnustep
gnustep
Reverse Depends:
  gnustep-games

How do I disable/remove gdomap?

So, you can temporarily turn gdomap off until the next restart:

$ sudo service gdomap stop

Or, you can stop the service and prevent it from starting on boot:

$ sudo service gdomap stop
$ sudo update-rc.d -f gdomap remove
# re-enable with: sudo update-rc.d gdomap defaults

Or, you can completely remove GNUStep:

$ sudo apt-get remove --purge gnustep
# NOTE: I had to run this too:
$ sudo apt-get autoremove

I removed GNUStep on my server; if I encounter any issues I'll be sure to post back.

josephdpurcell
  • 256
  • 2
  • 5
2

gdomap:

The gdomap daemon is used by GNUstep programs to look up distributed objects of processes running across the network (and between different user accounts on a single machine). The deamon is NOT used for lookup where two processes belonging to the same user are using a host-local connection.

You can turn gdomap off.

You can disable unwanted/unused services in Ubuntu in a very easy way. Go to System > Administration > Services. For more info see How To Disable Unwanted Services In Ubuntu.

Source: http://www.gnustep.org/resources/documentation/Developer/Tools/Reference/gdomap.html

Mitch
  • 107,631
  • 1
    I had already found this "definition" googling around, but I need some more specific explaination about what gdomap REALLY does. Ex.: what services/processes will not function if I disable it or what else depends on it. – jasmines Jun 15 '12 at 12:05
  • 1
    @Mitch Like jasmines says, I still don't get what it's really for. Could you elaborate? – Luc Mar 30 '13 at 21:04