Les Mikesell wrote:
> Aside from not liking the default, I don't like the obscure way it is
> broken.
Repeating that it is broken doesn't make it so. It is not configured
to your liking. It is absolutely not broken. As shipped sendmail
will accept mail quite happily from the localhost. It is working just
as it was intended, which is to be very limited to avoid potential
problems with services running by default that many users do not want
or need exposed to the outside world.
> 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.
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.
The steps to enable it to listen on other interfaces used to be part
of the release notes but it doesn't seem to be there in FC6. So that
part is a little harder for new users than it used to be. But again,
I think that it is not at all unreasonable to expect that those
setting up a mail server should have to do a little bit of reading to
achieve that goal.
>>File a bug and make your case to someone that might be able to do
>>something about it.
>
> I don't think it's a surprise to anyone. It was done on purpose.
Who said anything about it being a surprise? If you seriously think
the default sucks and/or could be done better, then you should file a
bug and make that case (Alan kindly supplied some potential arguments
for you). If you don't want to file a bug and potentially have the
issue resolved in a better way than it is now, then I don't see what
calling it broken here will achieve.
--
Todd OpenPGP -> KeyID: 0xBEAF0CE3 | URL: www.pobox.com/~tmz/pgp
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