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

[Bob Friesenhahn]

On Fri, 9 Nov 2012, Rob Shinn wrote:

> On Nov 9, 2012 8:24 PM, "Jim Klimov" <jimklimov at cos.ru> wrote:
>>
>> Back in Solaris 8 or so, the bundled sendmail included a default
>> smart_host definition, so that machines internal to a network
>> could collect and perhaps relay their messages on one dedicated
>> SMTP server. For this the /etc/mail/sendmail.cf file included
>>
>> DSmailhost$?m.$m$.
>
> Encouraging such laziness seems like a bad idea, IMHO.  There are many
> rootkits that include tools for hunting for mailservers named things like
> mail,  mailhost, etc.

I don't see any problem with conventions like 'mailhost'.  It is 
trivially easy to discover hosts which act as mail exchangers, even if 
they use unusual names.

I still run sendmail here and use this stripped-down configuration for 
internal hosts:

divert(0)dnl
VERSIONID(`@(#)sendmail.mc      1.11 (Sun) 06/21/04')
OSTYPE(`solaris8')dnl
DOMAIN(`solaris-generic')dnl
FEATURE(`nullclient', `mailhost$?m.$m$.')dnl

LOCAL_NET_CONFIG
R$* < @ $* .$m. > $*    $#esmtp $@ $2.$m $: $1 < @ $2.$m. > $3

Oddly, I discovered that this incantation was processed into a very 
broken configuration with OpenIndiana sendmail (as if the delivered m4 
files were wrong) so I copied the processed configuration file from a 
Solaris 10 system and then it worked just fine.

Bob
-- 
Bob Friesenhahn
bfriesen at simple.dallas.tx.us, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
GraphicsMagick Maintainer,    http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/