Les Mikesell wrote:
> Much of what we like about unix came from a tradition of re-using
> general purpose tools instead of re-inventing them for each new
> program and at the time sendmail needed a macro preprocessor, m4 was
> the general purpose tool already available. Today it's syntax seems
> a bit odd but it still does its job. But my point about it is that
> everything is obscure until you've seen an example.
That's quite true. Such an example used to be included in the release
notes. It's not there anymore and I don't know where it might have
been moved to these days (hopefully not to /dev/null).
> The other services that ship disabled can be enabled by the RedHat
> convention of:
> service servicename enable
> and made to activate on bootup with
> chkconfig servicename on
> Do you notice a different treatment compared to having to install
> another package and edit an undocumented file?
As Mikkel pointed out, sendmail is enabled by default due to other
system services needing to send mail locally, so the method of locking
it down is necessarily different than the others.
As far as being undocumented, the sendmail rpm has in its description:
"If you ever need to reconfigure Sendmail, you will also need to have
the sendmail.cf package installed. If you need documentation on
Sendmail, you can install the sendmail-doc package."
So you would know to install the proper packages to configure it.
I also think the comment in /etc/mail/sendmail.mc is fairly clear:
dnl # The following causes sendmail to only listen on the IPv4 loopback address
dnl # 127.0.0.1 and not on any other network devices. Remove the loopback
dnl # address restriction to accept email from the internet or intranet.
dnl #
DAEMON_OPTIONS(`Port=smtp,Addr=127.0.0.1, Name=MTA')dnl
Of course, you have to read some documentation to know that you need
to edit that file and then run make to create sendmail.cf. But that's
just the way sendmail is and anyone that's going to use it will have
to find that out sooner or later.
I'm not saying it wouldn't be fine to have a system-config-sendmail
program to do these things, but I imagine it would be a big pain to
create such a tool. Meanwhile, I can do the old style unix thing and
edit simple key = value stuff in /etc/postfix/main.cf and be happy. :)
--
Todd OpenPGP -> KeyID: 0xBEAF0CE3 | URL: www.pobox.com/~tmz/pgp
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