[PLUG] in.comsat Explanation

[Rich Shepard]

   I'd greatly appreciate having one of you expert SysAdmins explain the
"service in.comsat" line in secure-log. I see this every day.

  --------------------- Connections (secure-log) Begin ------------------------

Refused Connections:
    Service in.comsat:
       localhost.localdomain (127.0.0.1): 210 Time(s)

  ---------------------- Connections (secure-log) End -------------------------

  According to the in.comsat(8) man page,

"Comsat is the server process which receives reports of incoming mail and
notifies users if they have requested this service. Comsat receives messages
on a datagram port associated with the `biff'' service specification (see
services(5) and inetd(8)). The one line messages are of the form:

     user at mailbox-offset

"If the user specified is logged in to the system and the associated terminal
has the owner execute bit turned on (by a `biff y '' the offset is used as a
seek offset into the appropriate mailbox file and the first 7 lines or 560
characters of the message are printed on the user's terminal. Lines which
appear to be part of the message header other than the `From '' or `Subject''
lines are not included in the output."

   I don't know why it's turned on, how to turn it off, or why it's there in
the first place. The man page is not that comprehensive. More to the point,
should I even care about it?

TIA for the education,

Rich

-- 
Dr. Richard B. Shepard, President      | Author of "Quantifying Environmental
Applied Ecosystem Services, Inc. (TM)  | Impact Assessments Using Fuzzy Logic"
<http://www.appl-ecosys.com>   Voice: 503-667-4517   Fax: 503-667-8863