FreeBSD Help

[Sp00n]

I recently started a new management job and I have acquired a FreeBSD email server running sendmail/procmail/imanager/spamassassin.

Now it's been doing some strange things like denying smtp access randomly and after a bit of reading it seems that its common with older versions of sendmail.

Unfortunately its FreeBSD 4.7 and the version of sendmail is 8.13.6, so its not new and I'm wondering what sort of limitations I'm going to be hitting.

Also, I know next to nothing about bsd but I am pretty quick to pickup stuff so I'm not that scared, I just need to be pointed in the right direction.

Now on a linux system I would just use apt-get update/upgrade, is there something similar I can use for BSD? I read something about portsnap or portmanager but I don't really get it.

 

[Sp00n]

Upgrade the whole system? Is that something I can do from the CLI?

Sorry all of this has kind of been dumped on me, I'm a windows man at heart.

 

[Sp00n]

How did you get this job?

Every server is windows except for this VPS which runs our mail off site, I have noticed some problems and I'm pro-actively fixing them, that and the previous admin only administrated it via imanager so the OS didn't mean anything to him.

Portsnap isn't installed so I guess that's my first stop.

Will the latest version of sendmail run on 4.7?

Also, I appear to be missing /usr/ports/sysutil/portsnap

Haha... pkg_add gives me: package not found, christ this distro is soooooo old

 

[Sp00n]

The company is a joke, the VPS is a joke (4gb hdd) and we're running tight on funds right now.

Unfortunately what I am familiar with is windows running exchange which is too expensive, I need to find an alternative option elsewhere but I just wanted to see if I can resolve some issues that were going on right now.

 

[Sp00n]

Suggest you actually find out what's wrong before you go and change things.

Look in /var/log

and try to identify any errors in the logs that coincide with the random smtp access denies

It happened again this morning, a user tries to log in and gets this stupid error message again, I was tailing the log file to see what was going on and I saw this:

Sep 2 07:58:57 worthmedia ipop3d[86174]: Login user=ndodd host=[x.x.x.x] nmsgs=19/19
Sep 2 07:58:57 worthmedia ipop3d[86174]: Update user=ndodd host=[x.x.x.x] nmsgs=19 ndele=0
Sep 2 07:58:57 worthmedia ipop3d[86174]: Logout user=ndodd host=[x.x.x.x]
Sep 2 07:58:57 worthmedia sm-mta[86181]: AUTH=server, relay=[x.x.x.x], authid=ndodd, mech=PLAIN, bits=0

Whereas a "normal" login looks like this:

Sep 2 07:58:59 worthmedia ipop3d[86196]: Login user=smeno host=[x.x.x.x] nmsgs=0/0
Sep 2 07:59:00 worthmedia ipop3d[86196]: Update user=smeno host=[x.x.x.x] nmsgs=0 ndele=0

the thing is, the server allows PLAIN authentication as I've checked this via telnet and EHLO.

Now the user said he "fixed" it by changing his location on his mac from automatic to the company wifi, but it would have selected that anyway as there are no other wireless networks within range.

It's just so stupid and makes no sense, I'm going through sendmail.cf now to see if there is anything I can see.