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