Sorry if this is a dumb question ...
I've just set up a "secure" (you know .. more than usual) Debian system,
and want to arrange things so that it can send mail out when necessary
(in case anything happens that it thinks I should know about) but is
*not* constantly listening for incoming mail.
Is there a best way of doing this ?
The default Exim MTA is installed, and I've commented out the SMTP line
from inetd.conf, but there is a /etc/init.d/exim startup script that
comes with the Exim package, that has this :
# Exit if exim runs from /etc/inetd.conf
if [ -f /etc/inetd.conf ] && grep -q "^ *smtp" /etc/inetd.conf; then
exit 0
fi
[...]
case "$1" in
start)
echo -n "Starting MTA: "
start-stop-daemon --start --pidfile /var/run/exim/exim.pid \
--exec $DAEMON -- -bd -q30m
So one way or the other, Exim gets to listen.
In exim.conf, there is
# This will cause it to accept mail only from the local interface
#local_interfaces = 127.0.0.1
so I could set that option. Would that stop Exim from binding to the
ethernet interface ?
Should I just remove the S20exim symlink from rc?.d ?
That seems a bit of a kludge. If this was NetBSD, I'd set something
like "exim=no" in somewhere like rc.conf ... is there a Debian
equivalent to that ?
TIA for any advice.
Nick Boyce
Bristol, UK
