Ung. Blear. Whee. Huh?

[penk]

*RRRING*

"yegods, its 4am. it MUST be a wrong number."

*kerclick* "mrrphllo?"

"Dave, its dave! I need you on the meetingplace right now. There's a sendmail attack going on now, and we need to patch our servers up to fix the latest vulnerability. That patch you did to [main test environment]? I need tht to go to production right now."

"mrarem. huh. what? i didn't patch [main test environment]"

"You didnt'? I thought you did! Okay, sorry to wake you up, can you dial in to Meetingplace? [our conferencing system]"

"uhh. yeah. k. sure. uh. gimme a few."

*click*

*stagger* *thump* "SWEET JUMPIN JESUS, it _IS_ 4am."

Of course, somewhere around here while getting something warm on and going downstaris I had the evil nightmare thought that I might have dreamed that whole sequence, and when I dialled in, no one would be there.

Alas, such was not the case. 3 hours later, we're patched up, mostly, and I've got a sendmail cf headache.

The good news - during the call, the [my company] corporate security dude did the "Why are you guys still running sendmail? We've all switched to linux boxes and Postscript"

Hot damn 8)

Comments

[steam.livejournal.com]

Postscript? Er. Postfix, maybe? I mean, I've written postscript before, but I'd like to see how you've implemented an MTA in it. ;-)

GAH. yah.

[penk.livejournal.com]

Wow. Good thing I didn't do anything important, like modify running production machines or anything.

Yes, I meant postfix ;)

sendmail delenda est

[dr-memory.livejournal.com]

Gah, dude, I am so, so sorry. Such are the vagaries of a sysadmin's life.

At least it sounds like you have implicit go-ahead to give your place a sendmailectomy, which can only be good.

My current top list of shoot-on-sight programs that people insist on running for no discernable reason:

5. php-nuke
4. qpopper
3. BIND
2. majordomo 1.x
1. sendmail

It just boggles my mind that this crap is still in production use in 2003. It seems no amount of pain will cause some organizations to learn...

[beowabbit]

Um, well, if your MTA's written in Postscript, it may not be very secure, but it's also not likely to be cracked by joe random scriptkiddy's leet rootkit. :-) (Ya know, I wonder if anybody's actually ever written an MTA in Postscript.)

I lucked out - currently Postfix at work (maybe Exim soon), and Exim at home.

Postfix yummy

[mr-niggle.livejournal.com]

We're running it in conjunction with spam assassin to protect our lame-o exchange servers from a lunchtime serving of spam. Very nice--not like the mean nasty sendmail.

Glad I got to sleep through this one (though I didn't get to sleep through an iManage upgrade that kept me at work till the wee hours last night.

Ah well.

Peace Out.

Huhwhat?

[sarahshevett.livejournal.com]

uh what hey? "TED.........what does this mean?"
Oh
Oh I understand, kinda.

Huhwhat?

[sarahshevett.livejournal.com]

uh what hey? "TED.........what does this mean?"
Oh
Oh I understand, kinda.
Ok sendmail attack.
At least when you get an emergency call you can stay in your pajamas and usually body fluids or machinery isn't involved.
I say usually