Why is a web server running on my machine?

[dandv]

I'm a developer and often work with web applications that run dev web servers on port 8000. Today I found out that the web app I was developing couldn't bind to port 8000 because the address was in use! I certainly hadn't installed any sort of web server and was even worried that some malware might've installed a backdoor on that port.

netstat showed that webfs was listening to port 8000, and apt-cache rdepends --no-{suggests,conflicts,breaks,replaces,enhances} --installed --recurse webfs showed that smplayer installed it. A search revealed . However, the port listed in Network -> Chromecast is 8010, not 8000. Also, there's no option to disable it.

I don't use Chromecast. I'm not sure how other folks feel about running a web server (let alone on a popular port), but perhaps this shouldn't happen automatically when SMPlayer updates.

[rvm]

I'm so sorry about that.
SMPlayer uses webfs to run a web server to serve files for chromecast. It uses port 8010 by default. However it seems the webfs deb package starts webfsd on port 8000 as a service. You can uninstall the webfs package.

I think I'll remove webfs in the list of recommended packages to avoid to get automatically installed for most of the users.