[PLUG] nullmailer & ssmtp

[JP Vossen <jp@jpsdomain.org>]

Monday night at PLUG W we were talking about ways to get mail (e.g., 
cron job failures, logchecks, low disk) from machines that aren't mail 
servers.  Sure you can install Sendmail (shudder :) or Postfix, but 
that's a lot of attack surface, resource overhead and configuration 
overhead you don't need or want.

Instead, just use 'nullmailer' on Debian/Ubuntu, or 'ssmtp' on CentOS/RHEL.

### RPM-ish (Red Hat, Suse)
$ yum -C info ssmtp
Loaded plugins: fastestmirror
Installed Packages
Name       : ssmtp
Arch       : x86_64
Version    : 2.61
Release    : 15.el5
Size       : 92 k
Repo       : installed
Summary    : Extremely simple MTA to get mail off the system to a Mailhub
URL        : http://packages.debian.org/stable/mail/ssmtp
License    : GPLv2+
Description: A secure, effective and simple way of getting mail off a 
system to your mail hub. It contains no suid-binaries or other dangerous 
things - no mail spool to poke around in, and no daemons running in the 
background. Mail is simply forwarded to the configured mailhost. 
Extremely easy configuration.

WARNING: the above is all it does; it does not receive mail, expand 
aliases or manage a queue. That belongs on a mail hub with a system 
administrator.


### APT-ish (Debian/Ubuntu)
$ apt-cache show nullmailer
Package: nullmailer
Priority: extra
Section: mail
Installed-Size: 280
Maintainer: Norbert Tretkowski <nobse@debian.org>
Architecture: i386
Version: 1:1.04-1.1
Replaces: mail-transport-agent
Provides: mail-transport-agent
Depends: libc6 (>= 2.7-1), libgcc1 (>= 1:4.1.1), libstdc++6 (>= 4.1.1), 
debconf (>= 0.5) | debconf-2.0, lsb-base
Recommends: sysklogd | system-log-daemon
Conflicts: lsb, mail-transport-agent, suidmanager (<< 0.52)
Filename: pool/main/n/nullmailer/nullmailer_1.04-1.1_i386.deb
Size: 90624
MD5sum: 8dd3d0b89d4c8339d45e5186d20e1551
SHA1: 0a02e77c7ed04f13b917dd11a6dd8dd06bf00686
SHA256: c63099b79ac72b1497ac8c69a469ee58d89d41b9b72be3bba427afcee74f2908
Description: simple relay-only mail transport agent
 Nullmailer is a replacement MTA for hosts, which relay to a fixed set
 of smart relays. It is designed to be simple to configure and
 especially useful on slave machines and in chroots.
 .
 The sendmail interface of this package doesn't provide the -bs switch,
 hence it's not LSB compatible!
Homepage: http://untroubled.org/nullmailer/
Tag: interface::daemon, mail::transport-agent, network::server, 
protocol::smtp, role::program, works-with::mail


Later,
JP
----------------------------|:::======|-------------------------------
JP Vossen, CISSP            |:::======|      http://bashcookbook.com/
My Account, My Opinions     |=========|      http://www.jpsdomain.org/
----------------------------|=========|-------------------------------
"Microsoft Tax" = the additional hardware & yearly fees for the add-on
software required to protect Windows from its own poorly designed and
implemented self, while the overhead incidentally flattens Moore's Law.
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