New thread title: Am I running any unnecessary services?

[Nothinman]

Some people are scared of sendmail. It's had a rocky past wrt security.

And it's configuration file is harder to read than perl.

 

[n0cmonkey]

Originally posted by: Nothinman

Some people are scared of sendmail. It's had a rocky past wrt security.

And it's configuration file is harder to read than perl.

The distro should set it up with good defaults so most people won't have to mess with it. 😉

 

[Nothinman]

And most of them do. But that's no excuse to have the worst config file syntax ever, the daemon should still be configurable by normal people. Every other mailer daemon manages it AFAIK, why should sendmail be special?

 

[n0cmonkey]

Originally posted by: Nothinman
And most of them do. But that's no excuse to have the worst config file syntax ever, the daemon should still be configurable by normal people. Every other mailer daemon manages it AFAIK, why should sendmail be special?

Maybe that's one of the things they "fix" in sendmail X or whatever their rewrite was going to be.

 

[nweaver]

dyndns has a daemon that you can run for most distros. NOt sure for debian, but I think they do have source (worked on my gentoo rig)

 

[Nothinman]

Infact, there are several dyndns clients in Debian.

 

[GTaudiophile]

Okay, so two more questions...

1) If you go here and do CTRL-F and search for "ipcheck". I understand the instructions until this part:

sudo chmod 700 /root/dyndns_update.sh
sudo sh /root/dyndns_update.sh
export EDITOR=gedit && sudo crontab -e

I changed the last line to export EDITOR=nano && sudo crontab -e and am not sure if the text 00 * * * * sudo sh /root/dyndns_update.sh resides in the proper file. Is that text suppost to appear in /etc/crontab?

2) I am looking at the howto on how to install Postfix. It seems pretty complicated. I don't quite understand how I install it such that it only sends e-mail to me/itself? And I still don't understand the need for there to be an MTA installed. Certain services need to send me alters? To me? How/where does it send it to me? Totally confused.


Note: Keep in mind my situation. I am simply running this server at home on a standard 8Mb Comcast connection.

 

[n0cmonkey]

Originally posted by: GTaudiophile
Okay, so two more questions...

1) If you go here and do CTRL-F and search for "ipcheck". I understand the instructions until this part:

sudo chmod 700 /root/dyndns_update.sh
sudo sh /root/dyndns_update.sh
export EDITOR=gedit && sudo crontab -e

I changed the last line to export EDITOR=nano && sudo crontab -e and am not sure if the text 00 * * * * sudo sh /root/dyndns_update.sh resides in the proper file. Is that text suppost to appear in /etc/crontab?

I don't think there is an /etc/crontab. crontab information is kept somewhere else, since all users have one. That line should run the dyndns_update.sh every hour, on the hour.

The instructions look fine, and should load that line into (I'm guessing) root's crontab.

2) I am looking at the howto on how to install Postfix. It seems pretty complicated. I don't quite understand how I install it such that it only sends e-mail to me/itself? And I still don't understand the need for there to be an MTA installed. Certain services need to send me alters? To me? How/where does it send it to me? Totally confused.

Some daemons (services don't do anything, deamons do 😉) need to send e-mail on the local machine. They generally send the e-mail to the root account on the local machine. If you login as root, you may get something like mail for root or There is no mail for root. That e-mail gets there from the MTA.

If I could read those instructions, I'd try to offer more help. Everything in the black boxes is TINY and BLURRY. 😕

 

[n0cmonkey]

inet_interfaces = all mynetworks_style = host

might need to be soemthing like:

inet_interfaces = lo mynetworks_style = host

This is why how-to's are generally crap. They tell you how they set it up, without explaining why. :|

 

[GTaudiophile]

Originally posted by: n0cmonkey

inet_interfaces = all mynetworks_style = host

might need to be soemthing like:

inet_interfaces = lo mynetworks_style = host

This is why how-to's are generally crap. They tell you how they set it up, without explaining why. :|

I have come to same conclusion.

 

[Nothinman]

The default installation of postfix should be sufficient, it's not setup to relay for anything other than the localhost out of the box. Also the postconf(5) man page should cover all of the configuration directives and their meanings if you do find you need to change something.