gnome/xorg Removal

By default, CentOS will install a base set of packages on any box whether it is a server or workstation. But many of the default packages are useless on a web server. These packages are not used but are frequently updated and hog resources during patching. After testing on development equipment, the following commands were issued via cluster SSH in production

runlevel
yum remove gnome*
yum remove xorg*
yum -y remove joystick cdparanoia wireless-tools flac audiofile cdrecord saba* openoffice* bluez* gimp* inews* gphoto* hicolor-icon-theme* gstreamer* cups* gnome* xorg*

Make sure the runlevel is '3' before removing gnome and xorg.

I experimented with yum groupremove, but found during a cluster SSH session of 10 servers, at least 1 of them would not recognize the "X Windows Server" group. To keep the cluster SSH session synchronized as possible, removing one layer at a time worked the best. In the third line, we remove gnome and xorg again because CentOS was leaving a few packages behind.