Alan wrote:
Yet, those same versions shipped named and ssh daemons that were just as
insecure (perhaps more so) and had no similar network restriction applied.
No. That was still the era when you had to get cryptographic applications
from Finland if my memory is good, and certainly they had a few ssh
problems but nothing like sendmail back then.
That might have been the theory. In practice I had machines exploited
via named and ssh holes at least through the RH 6.x era - maybe as late
as early 7.x. I'm pretty sure they came from the base install.
named wasn't default install for a desktop (you don't need it on a
desktop), sendmail is needed because you need an internal mailing system
of some format.
Desktop? People were using RH for servers then. Unless vi or emacs was
your favorite editor, there wasn't a lot you would want on your desktop
and even if there had been, you had to run that mailer somewhere...
For some unusual definition of rational, I suppose. Rational decisions
would apply to all similar network packages. There is clearly some
prejudice involved here.
Mind the little man under your bed, he's out to get you ;)
You can have your idea of equal treatment, I'll keep mine. The programs
that have actually been exploited on my machines had no such
discrimination. And since I needed a working mailer (doesn't everyone?)
it wasn't particularly in my interest to supply one that didn't work.
non-default RPM, no GUI tool, and not much documentation pretty much
forever, the argument that 'sendmail should be replaced because it is
complicated' is just self-fullfilling. Half a dozen examples of
sendmail.mc and a 'pick one' approach would cover the vast majority of
The .mc stuff exists because sendmail is complicated, and the fact there
isn't a one liner change in a trivial human readable config file is
because we kept sendmail rather than switching to exim because quite a
few Red Hat folks even back then during the sendmail hole of the week era
decided that users expected sendmail and it was the "normal" choice.
The .mc stuff exists because sendmail has a complete programming
language for its low level configuration and not everyone is a
programmer experienced in in that language. Yes, keeping sendmail was
sensible. Not providing a working configuration was not, and not
building a GUI for the commonly required changes was even less sensible.
Now you have a user base that knows nothing about email even though it
is less than a one-line change in sendmail.mc to make it work the way
you would expect on a unix-like system. And they think sendmail doesn't
work, simply because the RH/fedora configuration doesn't work as shipped.
--
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell@xxxxxxxxx
