On Wed, Jun 02, 2004 at 10:01:04PM +0100, James Wilkinson wrote: > > Jeff Grossman wrote: > > How do I make it so when I have first > > booted into FC2, the network is not active so mail is not processed with > > no users set up or anything like that? > > Take the network cable out? > > But actually, that shouldn't be necessary. Sendmail is configured by > default not to accept connections from any other computer (this is in > the release notes), and you can configure the firewall during setup > so the firewall allows no connections from external computers. Then > you can reconfigure it later. Do not discount the unplug solution, it has value. If mail was pending for delivery it could be rejected and returned to sender when the system came up and was not configured to accept mail. For some, the default sendmail configuration could reject/bounce mail this way. Compare and contrast sendmail configured to not accept external connections and booting with "chkconfig sendmail off". Also "service sendmail stop". Ideally you want a spare system name and IP address to configure a server so you can do simple tests and update software then switch to the famous name. Lacking that unplug and service sendmail stop chkconfig sendmail off Now you can connect to the net and configure things that sendmail depends on like DNS, NTP, aliases, procmail, up2date, etc. Then correct sendmail's setup and test with caution. The whole trick is to prevent the external connections from seeing an error that causes mail to be rejected. Most mail relay hosts will hold mail for days. But the first 'real' connection that results in a rejection and it bounces back instantly. -- T o m M i t c h e l l /dev/null the ultimate in secure storage.
