[OpenIndiana-discuss] mailhost and other "standard" hostnames

[Jim Klimov]

On 2012-11-10 15:27, Rob Shinn wrote:
> Well, Solaris also used to have rsh and telnet enabled by default. See what
> I mean?


Well, you do have a valid point. I do even agree that a publicly
open sendmail server by default is not needed (not everywhere) :)

However, a working sendmail client for initiating messages from
local OS user/root accounts into local or remote mailboxes - and
at that, working with as minimal admin attention and interverntion
as possible - that is likely desired or even required (otherwise
your cron-initiated reports would just pile up as thousands of
files in /var/spool/clientmqueue or somesuch, waiting to be
processed by sendmail-client SMF service).

For the sendmail client part, the /etc/mail/*.cf files suffice,
it is run as a userspace client program (i.e. via mailx) once
per message, uses the config (in my case, posting to SMART_HOST
instead of trying to directly access any and all of the remote
hosts if the recipient is non-local), and exits without listening
on the network or opening up security "holes".

Delivery to local mailboxes (/var/mail/root in case of sendmail)
does, however, require an SMTP daemon listening on localhost:25...
The sendmail SMF service by secure default does just that, and
is not accessible from outside the local OS image. It does often
needlessly complain about host naming if a domain is not defined
(since it only listens on localhost anyway - naming is irrelevant),
but is not much of a problem IMHO.

//Jim Klimov