[Mimedefang] Mail Admin Question

[Ben Kamen]

On 2012-08-17 12:41 PM, Jon Rowlan wrote:
>
> As I run exchange and sendmail/MD systems I thought I would see why the
> exchange bods were being bashed again ...
>
> Did I miss something?

Sort of. And it's because you run sendmail/MD systems (most importantly, not exchange).

My best story on exchange admins is:

A client of mine had a local pair of Email admins acting as consultants installed an exchange server for  my client.
This was something that apparently they had much proficiency doing.

They called me (at the request of my  client) to sort out some final issues they were having that they hoped I could help resolve.

The told me in their final testing, they couldn't telnet to the mail server. (This new exchange system.)

In our conversations, they were rather bland in their level of detail. They told me they enabled telnet in services, but when they tried to connect it didn't work. So I gave them some suggestions and they told me they'd try and call me back.

They call back a couple hours later with no luck...

So now I start to really quiz them on why they're trying to telnet to a windows server -- I know Windows can do it - but it's not like a Unix shell where you can do *anything* you want to a poor system.

They explained to me "the instructions" recommend it... I asked them to describe for me and read back some of these steps. So they proceed to tell me about using "telnet" to "test the mail server" on "port 25"...

HA!!

I asked them, "do you have exchange running yet"? They told me "no".

I informed them, you do realize that telnet, the service is on port 23. You are "telnetting" to port 25 to establish a connection with the mail daemon which is Exchange -- and you don't have it running. Telnet, the windows service has nothing to do with what you are trying to do.


These were seasoned/experience MAIL ADMINs...

They scared me.

   -Ben