Disabling sendmail

John Abreau jabr at blu.org
Fri Feb 18 13:00:56 EST 2000


On Fri, 18 Feb 2000 Vincent Cocco <vcocco at admin.suffolk.edu> wrote:

> I'm currently running Linux Mandrake and do not want to run sendmail.  I
> know you can just go into the RedHat setup screen and uncheck the box
> and not have it run when the system boots.  I've done this, but then
> when I try sending an email to an account on the Linux box, (as a test)
> it always get's delivered.  This does'nt make sense to me:  why  disable
> sendmail on startup only give to people on the outside the ability to
> send mail to an account on the Linux box?
> 
> There's so many init* files, which one do I edit to comment out the
> startup line for sendmail?

When you send the test message, are you sending it from the local machine
or from a remote system? If you're sending it locally, most mail composers
will start up a private instance of sendmail to hand off delivery to.
Shutting down the sendmail daemon disables the SMTP port so incoming mail
won't be accepted, but local mail doesn't go through the SMTP port.

On the other hand, if mail from a remote system is getting delivered, i.e.
if the SMTP port is indeed active, then (on Redhat) you can go into
each of the /etc/rc.d/rc*.d directories and delete the S*sendmail startup
files. Mandrake used to be based on Redhat, so I'd guess the directory is
most likely in the same place. Note that the GUI tools for managing the
runlevels are essentially just deleting or renaming these S* and K* files.

--
John Abreau / Executive Director, Boston Linux & Unix 
Email: jabr at blu.org / URL: http://www.blu.org
ICQ#28611923 / AIM abreauj
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