sendmail Version 8.12 Uses TCP Wrappers

This feature is new in the Solaris Express 9/03 release.

In the Solaris Express 8/04 release, sendmail version 8.13 is the default. See sendmail Version 8.13.

TCP wrappers provide a way of implementing access controls by checking the address of a host that is requesting a particular network service against an access control list. Requests are granted or denied, accordingly. Besides providing this access control mechanism, TCP wrappers also log host requests for network services, which is a useful monitoring function. Examples of network services that might be placed under access control include rlogind, telnetd, and ftpd.

In this Solaris release, version 8.12 of sendmail now enables the use of TCP wrappers. This check does not bypass other security measures. By enabling TCP wrappers in sendmail, a check has been added to validate the source of a network request before the request is granted. See the hosts_access(4) man page.

The Solaris 9 release added support for TCP wrappers in inetd(1M) and sshd(1M).