I've read something that says that running a sendmail daemon is a security risk and that running the daemon is really unnecessary if the machine is not a mail server/relay.

Given that, how do i tell the sendmail daemon is running automatically on boot,
how do i turn it off (and prevent it from starting on boot?)

oh, running SuSE 9.2

I don't have a sendmail.cf file, so i guess i can conclude that I'm not running sendmail

You can tell ifsendmail is running with ps aux | grep sendmail -- if yo see a sendmail process, it's running. To disable it at boot, turn off the init script that starts the daemon. On RH systems, this can be accomplished by "chkconfig sendmail off". Note that in some default RH configs, sendmail is set to listen only on the loopback interface, which makes it much less of a risk. Do go ahead and disable it if you don't want it, though.

You probably don't need an SMTP daemon running if you aren't a mail server. In general, running any daemon you don't need only increases the chances for exploit.

However, the "sendmail is a security risk" argument is mostly trotted out by people who don't really understand sendmail, or are not discussing a modern version thereof. So don't believe it.

Some ways to tell if sendmail is running:
ps axw | grep sendmail | grep -v grep should produce some output if sendmail is running.

netstat -ltpn (run as root) will show you which processes are listening on which TCP ports. If sendmail is running, you will see it listening on port 25 (SMTP).

To tell what starts at boot:
chkconfig --list will print a listing of which scripts in /etc/init.d/ run at which runlevels.

To stop sendmail from starting at boot (on SuSE):
insserv -r sendmail

To stop sendmail if it's running right now:
/etc/init.d/sendmail stop


The default behavior of mailer daemons on SuSE is to listen for local connections only. For sendmail to listen remotely on port 25, you must set SMTPD_LISTEN_REMOTE="yes" in /etc/sysconfig/mail. Also note that the default SuSE MTA is postfix, not sendmail.

thanks for the input.
it looks like sendmail is not running, so security risk or not, all is well.