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Re: who makes the firewall that puts asterisks in the initial greeting?

2001-08-10 22:54:24

[apologies in advance for the rant]

On Fri, Aug 10, 2001 at 10:37:48PM -0400, 
Valdis(_dot_)Kletnieks(_at_)vt(_dot_)edu wrote:
Yes, it's that bad, and yes, Keith is justified. ;)

It's worse than bad.  It's evil and stupid.

If the host is a public mail server then the banner provides useful
information.  Munging the banner is a bug, not a feature.  If I want
to tailor the banner, then I will configure my mail system to do so.

If the host is not a public mail server, then the service should be
blocked entirely, not munged.

This obfuscation, therefore, serves no valuable purpose and its use
can only be a detriment.

The chip on my shoulder is because I had to do mail system debugging
across a Cisco PIX inserted by a network manager who refused to believe
his network could be messing with the SMTP session I was trying to
analyze.

-- 
Chip Rosenthal              Now we buy spam at the grocery store,
http://www.unicom.com/      cause you can't eat the fish no more.
<chip(_at_)unicom(_dot_)com>             - Little Village