Need WordPress security help.

[W0BTU]

It's Sendmail.

Have you ever seen the config file for it? Unbelievably complex!

I did manage to connect Sendmail with a couple of the public spam databases (like spamhaus), which rejects the vast majority of our spam. The Python files I mentioned look in /var/log/maillog for such rejected mail and adds their IP to the firewall for a couple of weeks.

I have seen many forum posts (like linuxquestions.org) supposedly explaining how to add from one to four lines to iptables to stop email flood attacks, but none of them were in agreement. One person even said doing that was counterproductive.

[KT1F]

Yes, it's been a while but I remember Sendmail was kind of a pain to configure. I'm probably stating the obvious but I assume you'll editing the human readable file and not the other one. I seem to remember that you edit one config file and then run something which creates the file that Sendmail actually uses. That one is even more unreadable.

I mostly use Ubuntu these days which uses Postfix by default. It's much easier to configure than Sendmail but looks like Sendmail from the outside so it is pretty much a drop in replacement. It even provides an executable file called "sendmail" with the same options so most applications that expect Sendmail to be present will work unchanged with Postfix.

[W0BTU]

You're supposed to edit sendmail.mc, not the generated sendmail.cf, yes. But the instructions I found involved editing sendmail.cf. Attached is what I did to a portion of sendmail.cf. Much to our surprise, it still works.

My leased LAMP server runs RHEL, BTW.

sendmail.cfCapture.PNG

[KT1F]

Well... that looks like fun. I guess there are things that the mc to cf compiler doesn't do. You'll have to be careful if you ever recompile the cf file to avoid overwriting your changes.

[W0BTU]

... I use it at a school where I'm the volunteer IT administrator. ...

You seem like a pretty sharp guy. No wonder you're able to do that.

I've been looking for someone to help out if I ever I get in a real jam with something I'm not familiar with. They guy we used to use didn't charge a lot, but as good as he was, we had no choice but to stop using him. I don't really have anyone I can call upon if something major happens. If you're interested, by all means send me a PM or e-mail.