disabling replication and bin logs on MySQL v4

[Madison Kelly]

Hi all,

   Being a PgSQL person, I'm woefully ignorant on the innards of MySQL. 
I've inherited a MySQL server that used to replicate to a now-gone 
slave. I've been trying to find out how to safely disable the master's 
habit of writing out the binary logs normally read by the slave. These 
generate about 9GB of files a day and the host just doesn't have the 
space for that.

   I've been using "PURGE BINARY LOGS TO 'file';" to clean it up, but it 
strikes me that the logs shouldn't be created at all. I was tempted to 
just comment out the 'log-bin' line in 'my.cnf', but I thought it'd be 
best to see what you guys had to say on the topic.

   It's MySQL 4.1.20 i686 on CentOS 4.3.

Thanks!

Madi