Technical Questions for a Network Project

[AaronMcH]

Hi

I'm looking to use my Pineapple as part of a larger home network project and would prefer to start with a minimal system, at first I thought about flashing the Pineapple with stock OpenWRT however after reading other forum topics this may cause more problems and more work than is necessary, so instead I have a few questions.

I would like to be able to do one of the following:

1. On start up not load any WiFi Pineapple services, e.g.  pineap, dnsmasq, hostapd, nginx (and by extension the Pinapple web interface), while still having working lights (if possible)
2. Load services such as hostapd, dnsmasq, nginx, etc with my own configs

I would prefer to do #1 and I'm assuming that would be the simpler option, what would be the best way to do this? If #1 is not possible easily I'll go to #2 and replace the existing configs that are there already.

In addition I was looking through the iptables rule tables, there seemed to be a lot of chains and rules, would removing all rules that are there currently cause any issues with the network interfaces, in other words, what are the bare minimum rules for USB adapters to function properly?

Note: I am aware that for example the USB eth interface needs DHCP working, this is fine, I'm strictly talking about iptables rules here, as the project will involve me manipulating and resetting the iptables rules set frequently.

Thank you
Aaron