MailScanner and syslog

[Nick Phillips]

On Wed, Mar 27, 2002 at 01:35:10PM -0000, Quentin Campbell wrote:

> Julian et al
>
> As a RedHat 7.2 user with no Perl experience at all I am very interested
> in Michael's contribution below. Any comments?

Yup. By default (and it used to be the only possible way, I believe),
Perl's Sys::Syslog logs via 514/udp whether it's to localhost or whatever.

A few months ago we debated whether or not to change the default in
mailscanner to use a UNIX domain socket, as below, and decided not to -
mainly because it's an unnecessary change for most people, and we were
making enough changes as it was.

Personally I think it would probably be a Good Thing to change it sooner
or later, as it eliminates the need for firewalling 514/udp to prevent
random jokers filling up your disk, or r00ting you via a broken syslogd.

> It may be that I am among the first to notice a problem with RedHat
> since I am also running MailScanner and sendmail on Solaris boxes and so
> have noticed a difference between those systems in what is logged to the
> mail logs.

If the "-r" no longer helps, it may be that in the most recent RedHats
something has changed - is 514/udp being filtered, is the syslogd different,
is routing to localhost set up correctly?



Cheers,



Nick

--
Nick Phillips -- nwp at lemon-computing.com
An avocado-tone refrigerator would look good on your resume.