Disable Bluetooth on CentOS / RHEL (Redhat) / Fedora Linux servers – Disable hidd bluetooth devices

Thursday, 29th January 2015

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Bluetooth protocol on Linux is nice to have (supported) on Linux Desktop systems to allow easy communication wth PDAs, Tablets, Mobiles, Digital Cameras etc, However many newly purchased dedicated servers comes with Bluetooth support enabled which is a service rarely used, thus it is a good strong server security / sysadmin practice to remove the service supporting Blueetooth (Input Devices) on Linux hosts this is the hidd (daemon) service, besides that there are few Linux kernel modules to enable bluetooth support and removing it is also a very recommended practice while configuring new Production servers. 

Leaving Blueetooth enabled on Linux just takes up memory space and  potentially is a exposing server to possible security risk (might be hacked) remotely. 
Thus eearlier I've blogged on how bluetooth is disabled on Debian / Ubuntu Linux servers an optimization tuning (check) I do on every new server I have to configure, since administrating both RPM and Deb Linux distributions I usually also remove bluetooth hidd service support on every CentOS / RHEL / Fedora Linux – redhat  (where it is installed), here is how :

 

1. Disable Bluetooth in CentOS / RHEL Linux


a) First check whether hidd service is running on server:
 

[root@centos ~]# ps aux |grep -i hid
… 


b) Disable bluetooth services
 

[root@centos ~]# /etc/init.d/hidd stop
[root@centos ~]# chkconfig hidd off
[root@centos ~]# chkconfig bluetooth off
[root@centos ~]# /etc/init.d/bluetooth off


c) Disable any left Bluetooth kernel module (drivers), not to load on next server boot
 

[root@centos ~]# echo 'alias net-pf-31 off' >> /etc/modprobe.conf


If you don't need or intend to use in future server USBs it is also a good idea to disable USBs as well:
 

[root@centos ~]# lsmod|grep -i hid
usbhid                 33292  0
hid                    63257  1 usbhid
usbcore               123122  4 usb_storage,usbhid,ehci_hcd


[root@centos ~]# echo 'usbhid' >> /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf
[root@centos ~]# echo 'hid' >> /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf
[root@centos ~]# echo 'usbcore' >> /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf

 

2. Disable Bluetooth on Fedora Linux

Execute following:
 

[hipo@fedora ~]# /usr/bin/sudo systemctl stop bluetooth.service
[hipo@fedora ~]# /usr/bin/sudo systemctl disable bluetooth.service

 
3. Disable Bluetooth on Gentoo / Slackware and other Linuces

An alternative way to disable bluetooth that should work across all Linux distributions / versions is:
 

[root@fedora ~]# su -c 'yum install rfkill'
[root@fedora ~]# su -c 'vi /etc/rc.d/rc.local'


Place inside, something like (be careful not to overwrite something, already execution on boot):
 

#!/bin/sh
rfkill block bluetooth
exit 0


4. Disable any other unnecessery loaded service on boot time

It is a good idea to also a good idea to check out your server running daemons, as thoroughfully as possible and remove any other daemons / kernel modules not being used by server.

To disable all unrequired services, It is useful to get a list of all enabled services, on RedHat based server issue:

 

[root@cento ~]#  chkconfig –list |grep "3:on" |awk '{print $1}'


 A common list of services you might want to disable if you're configuring (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP = LAMP) like server is:
 

chkconfig anacron off
chkconfig apmd off
chkconfig atd off
chkconfig autofs off
chkconfig cpuspeed off
chkconfig cups off
chkconfig cups-config-daemon off
chkconfig gpm off
chkconfig isdn off
chkconfig netfs off
chkconfig nfslock off
chkconfig openibd off
chkconfig pcmcia off
chkconfig portmap off
chkconfig rawdevices off
chkconfig readahead_early off
chkconfig rpcgssd off
chkconfig rpcidmapd off
chkconfig smartd off
chkconfig xfs off
chkconfig ip6tables off
chkconfig avahi-daemon off
chkconfig firstboot off
chkconfig yum-updatesd off
chkconfig mcstrans off
chkconfig pcscd off
chkconfig bluetooth off
chkconfig hidd off


In most cases you can just run script like this – centos-disable_non-required_essential_services_for_lamp_server.sh.
 

Another useful check the amount of services each of the running server daemons is using, here is how:
 

ps aux | awk '{print $4"t"$11}' | sort | uniq -c | awk '{print $2" "$1" "$3}' | sort -nr


Output of memory consumption check command is here

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