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

get it!  and the little tiny one (i call it robin :)!

>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]

this is what you get if you *telnet* to the smtp port.  you can also
run sendmail in the same mode (eg, smtp) from the command line.

>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.

% sendmail -bs
220 untraceable.net ESMTP Sendmail 8.8.8/8.8.8+ says it's Mon, 15 Dec 1997 15:44:08 -0500 (EST)
^D
% tail -1 /var/log/maillog
Dec 15 15:44:09 noc sendmail[8109]: NOQUEUE: Null connection from andrew@localhost

so-and-so@localhost is what you get when sendmail can't do a
getpeername() because it doesn't have one.  :)

fwiw - this was also a bug in paul vixie's rbl map code for sendmail.
if you ran sendmail like this with paul's rules in place, it would
refuse to accept mail.  there's a fix for this on the rbl pages.

http://maps.vix.com/rbl/

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