[2047] in Moira
Re: access service for outgoing mailers
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Tom Coppeto)
Tue Oct 21 07:34:38 2003
Date: Tue, 21 Oct 2003 07:34:17 -0400
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Cc: moiradev@mit.edu, Mark Silis <mark@mit.edu>
To: Jonathon Weiss <jweiss@mit.edu>
From: Tom Coppeto <tom@MIT.EDU>
In-Reply-To: <200310202245.h9KMj2t0022211@the-other-woman.mit.edu>
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Ok, I understand. We'll take a look at the logs and see if we can spot
the machines doing this.
- Tom
> The two addresses I was asking about were actually
> root@machine.mit.edu and mailer-daemon@machine.mit.edu. I was not
> intending to request that the user portion of either of these
> addresses be wildcarded (I agree that that defeats the purpose), only
> the domain name components before mit.edu. I don;t think we need to
> wildcard whatever is in the aliases file, merely the likely source of
> the mail.
>
> To try to clarify the cron case, if a cron job produces output (at
> least on an solaris machine) cron will generate mail to the user. At
> least for cron jobs run as root, that mail will come from
> root@machine.mit.edu and go to root@machine.mit.edu. On normal athena
> machines mail to root@machine.mit.edu will be bitbucketed by a stub
> aliases file, but on at least some private workstations the owner has
> updated that to point to say, their mit account. Since the
> workstation is not a mail server, but merely running some cron job, it
> is not configured to do direct delivery.
>
> Unfortunately, as mark asks, I don;t know the full scope of how many
> machines this will affect. I suspect it will be a small number of
> machines, but I'm not sure how to predict which of a much larger set
> of machines will be in the small group. Perhaps a quick look through
> outgoing's mail logs for {root,mailer-daemon}@machine.mit.edu whould
> shed some light on the problem?
>
>
>> If someone has a local alias file, or is producing mail from
>> mailer-daemon, isn't it the case they are likely running sendmail in
>> daemon mode and as such performing direct delivery?
>
> All athena workstations have aliases files, however, they are stub
> files in the deafult case. It is, however, possible to edit this file
> and change things like the destination of mail to root@localhost when
> the mail is generated on the local host, without running a sendmail
> daemon, or accepting mail off of the network in any way.
>
> Note that I'm worried about the mailer-daemon case, because it's the
> best chance to notice failures generated by imposing the restrictions
> discussed here. I don't know who likely this is to be a problem, but
> it would be frusterating to block our only way of detecting some of
> these problems. Perhaps we can leave this exception in place for only
> a short time to see if things turn up?
>
> Jonathon
