UFW Logs to port 4713

[Ibidem]

On Ubuntu, quite a few ports are open by default.

Avahi-daemon is needed for network printers (well maybe you could get around it, but...). That's about all, though.
It's worse than you'd guess: mDNS, the standard it implements, requires behavior that is inherently insecure.

Pulseaudio is not required for sound. It runs on top of Alsa or OSS; the Pulseaudio servers can be removed easily (and are the main security problem), but removing libpulse requires losing most of the multimedia stuff.
That said, Pulseaudio does let you use more than 1-2 sound programs at once, with per-application volumes (so does OSS4 ), and also adds some sound devices.

[SparTacux]

I reckon I can get rid of mdns.

I'm using static IP's - I guess I can set up each computer to point to the shared printer using IPP on it's own. mdns looks a little risky to me plus it's causing more network traffic than I need. I had quite a bit of traffic on port 631 too which was broadcasting as well as broadcasts on 5353. The result was that I 'seemed' to be losing packets from my SYSLOG which was coming from my router and the output on the SYSLOG was corrupted every now and then.

I might try removing pulse audio and see what happens as an experiment. I had one of my log files complain about rate limits being exceeded and several events supressed from pulsaudio.

[SparTacux]

Thanks for your input guys - You've given me a few things to think about I'll leave the thread open just in case someone else wants to add to it.