Hi, all! I'm not sure where the correct place to put this is, but I don't
really want to ask on UseNet, and this seems as inoffensive a spot as is
possible.

I don't have the bat book, but I'm curious as to the meaning of a logged
report from sendmail.

I got a message a short while ago on my console, so I looked in my logs,
and I found the following in /var/log/maillog:

Dec 14 22:43:28 acheron sendmail[1464]: NOQUEUE: SYSERR: putoutmsg
(user844.theonramp.net): error on output channel sending "220
acheron.middleboro.ma.us ESMTP Sendmail 8.8.8/8.8.7; Sun, 14 Dec 1997
22:43:28 -0500 (EST)": Broken pipe
Dec 14 22:43:28 acheron sendmail[1464]: NOQUEUE: Null connection from
root@localhost

What confuses me is the second message - I'm not sure what it means. When I
break a connection myself, I get something like:

Dec 14 23:21:17 acheron sendmail[1610]: NOQUEUE: Null connection from
localhost [127.0.0.1]

I'm not sure why the message I saw says null connection from
"root@localhost". I'd love to know... I don't really want to be broken open.

Thanks in advance for the information! It's likely that it was just someone
poking around, but I don't know enough about the messages to know whether
the intent was malicious or not.

--
Mason Loring Bliss...mason@acheron.middleboro.ma.us...www.webtrek.com/mason
"In the drowsy dark cave of the mind dreams build their nest with fragments
 dropped from day's caravan."--Rabindranath Tagore...awake ? sleep : dream;