Apparently I cannot send mail with my postfix on localhost to the network.

Previously this was working fine and I don't see any changes made to my 
postfix configuration files.

But in the last few days things have not gone well here. Firstly, my 
system was hijacked and used as an open proxy to send megabytes of spam 
to the network. :(. My isp filtered my outgoing smtp port and that is 
when I began to see a few errors in my /var/log/mail/errors file (unknown 
service tcp/smtp).

After finding out about this, I tried to post to the list and I don't 
think any of my messages went out. I had to go into /var/spool/postfix 
and start deleting a whole bunch of files in deferred - there was at one 
time seven megabytes of messages trying to get out! And those were the 
invalid addresses. I wonder how spammers survive -- I guess they just 
exploit other systems to do the dirty work :(.

At the moment, My box is better secured thanks to portsentry (why isn't 
this program in mandrake???? I could not urpmi it, but I did find it 
through rpmfind.org and the source rpm built and installed fine. 

I tried running shorewall but got nowhere. I don't know how to edit 
shorewall files and I don't want something that won't even let me ping my 
gateway when installed. iptables is running because of portsentry but I 
don't see anything that is specifically tied to port 25. And in atcp mode 
it's supposed to ignore certain standard ports anyway.

It seems like a catch 22 - if I disable the filters perhaps outbound smtp 
will work, but if I do that, I'm back to where I was before, and people 
will start targeting my box again. I counted 72 attempts of portscanning 
done in less than six hours, and 10 minutes after I restarted httpd I got 
spurious gets in my apache log files. I think this is how they got into 
my box in the first place, since I don't do much if any web stuff, and my 
log files are tiny - the other day they were over a megabyte.
 

-- 
------------------------------------------------------------------------
David E. Fox                              Thanks for letting me
[EMAIL PROTECTED]                            change magnetic patterns
[EMAIL PROTECTED]               on your hard disk.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------


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