Brian's Newbie question of the day

[Gerald Combs]

On Wed, 24 Jan 2001, Brian Densmore wrote:

> If I take my sendmail server out of daemon mode and have cron run it every
> 10 minutes, so as to enhance system security. What happens if someone tries
> to send mail to the hosted domains during that time? Will some application
> "wake" up sendmail to receive or does it go into that blackhole of failed
> mail delivery? I don't have a mail forwarder anywhere.

Setting up sendmail in this way (taking its entries out of /etc/rc.d and
running 'sendmail -q' from cron periodically) renders sendmail as an
outgoing-only service.  The security comes from the fact that there isn't
anything listening on port 25, ever.  This is usually how I install a
server, unless it's a mail server of course.

If you want to receive mail and you're concerned about security, then
don't run sendmail.  Run postfix or qmail instead.  I've been running
postfix for a while now, and am quite happy with it.  It's faster and
easier to configure, to boot.

>  
> Thanks, 
> Brian Densmore
> W:  densmoreb at ctbsonline.com <mailto:densmoreb at ctbsonline.com> 
> http://www.ctbsonline.com <http://www.ctbsonline.com> 
>  
> H: brian at aMason.net <mailto:brian at aMason.net> 
> http://www.aMason.net <http://www.aMason.net> 
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> Best Regards,
> Brian
> 
> Brian  <mailto:DensmoreB at ctbsonline.com> Densmore 
> 
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