On Tue, 17 Oct 2017, david wrote:
Folks
I am using sendmail as my mail server. SELINUX is disabled. I observe messages in Centos 7 (and 6) in /var/log/messages, similar to:
saslauthd[2765]: do_auth : auth failure: [user=bettie] [service=smtp] [realm=] [mech=pam] [reason=PAM auth error]
I guess that this is because somebody tried to access one of the SMTP ports with a logon attempt. This is understandable; there are crackers out there. I'd like to block SMTP completely from the originating sender (by dropping the IP packets), but don't know how to figure out what the IP address is. I don't see anything in the "maillog" that, for example, has the name "bettie" or some other clue. The only thing I see is a message like
sendmail[5452]: v9HIoBox005452: [xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx] did not issue MAIL/EXPN/VRFY/ETRN during connection to MTA
with a close timestamp, but I'm reluctant to tie the two log entries together.
Is there some log, or log setting that might enable me to tie the do_auth error to a specific IP address? I'm very reluctant to change mail servers to postfix or something like that.
The default sendmail LogLevel is 9, but if you bump it to 10 sendmail will log the remote IP address associated with auth failures. In your sendmail.mc file, set
define(`confLOG_LEVEL', `10')
Or, if you manually edit sendmail.cf (<shudder/>), then add
O LogLevel=10
You'll send up with mail log messages that correspond to the saslauthd failures you've noted:
2017-10-17T10:42:39.099125-04:00 mightymite sendmail[7240]: v9HEgTgp597220: AUTH failure (LOGIN): authentication failure (-13) SASL(-13): authentication failure: checkpass failed, relay=[nnn.nnn.nnn.nnn]