LinuxSA Mailing list archives

  From: Alan Kennington <akenning@dog.topology.org>
  To  : LinuxSA <linuxsa@linuxsa.org.au>
  Date: Fri, 24 Sep 1999 01:02:27 +0930

final post on sendmail

Worthy LinuxSA persons,

My apologies for taking up so much bandwidth
on the sendmail topic already.
But now it's all fixed, and everything's fine.
Many thanks for all the help and clues.

It turned out that you can indeed just get sendmail
8.9.3 straight off the net from www.sendmail.org
and just run "Build" and "Build install" on a
redhat 5.2 system, and it all goes perfectly.
I.e. the config files do not need to be changed
one slightest bit,a nd it functions _better_ than
before.

Just to fill in the details, now that my system is
secure, there's this organisation ORBS which goes
around being a world police-officer checking out
everyone's sendmail process to see if it can
be for spam relay. If it can, it adds it to a database,
and if you don't fix it in 30 days, it publicises it
so that ISPs and other sites all over the world
can put it in their spammers' black list,
just in case a spammer might use it to do relay.

In the bigpond direct context, the current pricing rules
mean that it would have cost me $50/day to be used
for spam relay. It's the monetary cost I was worried about,
although getting into black lists is also a bad thing.

The ORBS site was at

    http://www.orbs.org/

ORBS = Open Relay Behaviour-modification System 

As it turned out, they were totally technically correct
about everyting they said. Their system apparently
tests 17 different ways of hacking in to your mail relay.
They also give detailed info on how to fix the problem,
and they tell you which of their 17 tests failed.
Then they provide a facility to re-test your
site, and then you "get out of jail". I.e. they remove
you from their database, and they come back and check
you from time to see if you've kept up the good work....

Conclusion:

If any of you have sendmail 8.8.* sendmail on
an IP host which is exposed to the open Internet,
I'd recommend that you upgrade your sendmail
as soon as possible.
Reasons are given at:

    http://www.sendmail.org/current-release.html

I.e. this is a bug list of earlier sendmail versions.

I'll get out of your way now.
Regards all, sleep tight.
Alan Kennington.

PS.  By the way, a geek is a mutant new-born chick with
feathers that are malformed. A computer geek is
therefore a deformed, mustant outcast person.

A Nerd is someone who is just really not
socially acceptable. E.g. "What a nerd!".
It's a way of saying "you're not part of the
in group".

-- 
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