Solved: Sendmail question. Problem with yahoo.

Jon 'maddog' Hall maddog at li.org
Mon Apr 14 12:13:58 EDT 2008


>the 1st internet worm in 1988 was enabled because of the root access
>backdoor written into Sendmail.

If I remember correctly, that "back door" was only available when
Sendmail was run in debug mode.  I seem to remember this because a
friend of mine, Henry "no relation" Hall, was going to join us for
dinner at the Hacienda Mexican restaurant on Daniel Webster Highway in
Nashua with a bunch of other Digital people.   Then I heard on the car
radio about this "worm" that was attacking systems.  I gleaned enough
from the radio broadcast (an oddity in itself) to relay this to Henry,
who instead of coming to dinner made sure that the gateway email servers
in Digital were running Sendmail with debug mode turned off....keeping
Digital from being affected.

Unfortunately for most Unix systems, distributing and running Sendmail
in debug mode was much more the practice of the day in 1984.

md
-- 
Jon "maddog" Hall
Executive Director           Linux International(R)
email: maddog at li.org         80 Amherst St. 
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