18.2. Installing sendmail

The sendmail mail transport agent is included in prepackaged form in most Linux distributions. Installation in this case is relatively simple. Despite this fact, there are some good reasons to install sendmail from source, especially if you are security conscious. The sendmail program is very complex and has earned a reputation over the years for containing bugs that allow security breaches. One of the best known examples is the RTM Internet worm that exploited a buffer overflow problem in early versions of sendmail. We touched on this briefly in Chapter 9. Most security exploits involving buffer overflows rely on all copies of sendmail on different machines being identical, as the exploits rely on data being stored in specific locations. This, of course, is precisely what happens with sendmail installed from Linux distributions. Compiling sendmail from source yourself can help reduce this risk. Modern versions of sendmail are less vulnerable because they have come under exceedingly close scrutiny as security has become a more widespread concern throughout the Internet community.

The sendmail source code is available via anonymous FTP from ftp.sendmail.org.

Compilation is very simple bceause the sendmail source package directly supports Linux. The steps involved in compiling sendmail are:

# cd /usr/local/src # tar xvfz sendmail.8.9.3.tar.gz # cd src # ./Build

You need root permissions to complete the installation of the resulting binary files using:

# cd obj.Linux.2.0.36.i586 # make install

You have now installed the sendmail binary into the /usr/sbin directory. Several symbolic links to the sendmail binary will be installed into the /usr/bin/ directory. We'll talk about those links when we discuss common tasks in running sendmail.