Todd Zullinger wrote:
Other services that are disabled generally have standard and obvious
was to make them work normally.
Sendmail itself is obscure and non-obvious. I'm not surprised that
the method for configuring it not to listen is similar. I made a go
at using sendmail back in the RH5 and 6 days. I thought it was
ridiculously obtuse in its configuration and I ditched it.
It is ridiculously obtuse because you don't have examples for the
few changes you would be likely to want to make to sendmail.mc and the
package to rebuild it isn't included by default. So you have to wade
though the full general programming language of sendmail.cf instead -
which you should only have to do if you are inventing a new technique
for the first time.
Not only did it save me many security holes, it made my life much
easier by using a sane MTA. Fortunately, sendmail seems to have
worked quite hard on not having so many holes these days, but it is
still a PITA to configure as far as I can tell.
Sendmail is no different in terms of security holes than named, sshd,
ftpd, or the kernel itself. They've all had security holes and fixed
them. Why single out sendmail in this respect?
If you can find a similar example to what you want to do (and there are
only so many sane ways to handle email, mostly involving delivering to a
user with the same login as the address...) it is usually a matter of a
line or two in sendmail.mc.
--
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell@xxxxxxxxx
