no mail from / for root

[David Tonhofer, m-plify S.A.]

--On Wednesday, February 08, 2006 4:12 PM +0000 j_70 at comcast.net wrote:

> I have an RHES4 mahine which does not send any mail to or from root.
> For example, the result of a cron job is not sent. I thought this
> service was enabled by default. If not, which services is it.
> I have read that sendmail has some security issues and since this
> machine will not be mailing the outside world, I did not want to start
> or configure it. Not sure where to start looking. TIA.

First, the sendmail executable has to be running. Check this
with chkconfig(8). If you don't receive mails on that machine,
you can just leave port 25 closed in the iptables - but then
you will be unable to accept mail bounces and some servers will
refuse to accept mail if they find out that the sender is not
a proper mailserver listenting on port 25.

Now..

I don't know whether sendmail still has security problems,
nevertheless the delivery of the Sendmail Bat book onto
my desk (by forklift) made me look elsewhere.

You can get rid of sendmail and install postfix instead:

1) up2date --update postfix

Configuration is easy, just read through /etc/postfix/main.cf.
Configure the server to always run using chkconfig(8).
After that if you

2) rpm erase sendmail

Postfix should transparently take over through the 'alternatives'
link setup, i.e. the /usr/lib/sendmail link will point
(indirectly) to a postfix-provided executable.

Another option is qmail. Not supported out of the box on RH
due to (unwise qmail licensing)&&(Red Hat showing some ass) AFAIK.