Hmmm.

[feren]

You know, I'm a horrible, horrible geek. I'm just not happy unless I have my fingers dirty, my sleeves rolled up and my hands in some sort of project -- it doesn't matter if that project is a car engine rebuild, a computer overhaul, pulling single-mode fiber or something else, I feel compelled to keep myself busy. Tonight's project of choice is Sendmail, and overhauling it so that I can allow people to relay their SMTP traffic through me without becomming some spammer's bitch. I was able to locate a couple documents and followed them closely. It seemed like everything worked just fine! There's just... one.... teensy little problem: I can't for the life of me figure out why it isn't actually working. I turned on AUTH, I turned on STARTTLS, I got all my certificates in a row, AUTH PLAIN shows up as an extended option...

... and the damn thing still won't let me relay. When I base-64 encode my username and password I get a string that looks okay. I get a challenge that looks okay. I pass it to the Sendmail connection with the proper syntax (the syntax looks okay too)... and whammo, failure.

# telnet localhost 25
Trying 127.0.0.1...
Connected to localhost.
Escape character is '^]'.
220 panther.black-panther.us ESMTP Sendmail 8.12.10/8.12.10; Tue, 28 Oct 2003 22:57:51 -0500
ehlo localhost
250-panther.black-panther.us Hello root@localhost.localdomain [127.0.0.1], pleased to meet you
250-ENHANCEDSTATUSCODES
250-PIPELINING
250-EXPN
250-VERB
250-8BITMIME
250-SIZE
250-DSN
250-ETRN
250-AUTH PLAIN
250-STARTTLS
250-DELIVERBY
250 HELP
AUTH PLAIN AGZlcmVuBzhhdWcuIXU=
535 5.7.0 authentication failed

All I get from /var/log/maillog is

Oct 28 22:50:33 panther sendmail[3723]: STARTTLS=server, relay=blah.blah.com [www.xxx.yyy.zzz], version=TLSv1/SSLv3, verify=NOT, cipher=RC4-MD5, bits=128/128
Oct 28 22:50:33 panther sendmail[3723]: h9T3oXRo003723: ruleset=check_rcpt, arg1=<jolsen@devry.com>, relay=blah.blah.com [www.xxx.yyy.zzz], reject=550 5.7.1 <jolsen@devry.com>... Relaying denied. Proper authentication required.
Oct 28 22:50:33 panther sendmail[3723]: h9T3oXRo003723: from=<feren@black-panther.us>, size=0, class=0, nrcpts=0, proto=ESMTP, daemon=MTA, relay=blah.blah.com [www.xxx.yyy.zzz]

I just don't get it. Ah well. It's not terribly important, but it would be nice to get SMTP AUTH working for relays so that I can stop opening up my server to half of Southern Minnesota, ya know?

In other news I went to another real estate agent today (one who happens to be local to my complex no less), and asked her to list options for me in the Wheeling/Buffalo Grove/Vernon Hills area. I wasn't terribly surprised when the answer was "townhouse, condo or coach home?" I'm not enthused about any of those choices -- I've spent the last seven years sharing walls with other people, I would like it to stop now please. I guess this means I'm back to looking at Lansing... but I'll continue to have this agent research options for me in the Northwest Suburbs to see what I might find. You never know, I might like a townhouse. While I seriously doubt it would ever happen (lightning is more likely to strike first) I can't know for certain if I don't at least look.

The epic search continues!

I woke up this morning with a buzz rolling 'round in my brain