HP-UX Mailing Services Administrator's Guide

Configuring and Administering Sendmail
Security
Chapter 2 79
Support for RFC 1413 (Identification Protocol)
identd is a server that implements the TCP/IP proposed standard
IDENT user identification protocol as specified in RFC 1413. identd
listens on port 113 and operates by looking up specific TCP/IP
connections and returning the user owing the process owning the
connection.
Sendmail uses identd as an advisory mechanism to log the identity of
the user name and host name of the Sendmail client. identd may cause
additional traffic for collecting the user name, which may adversely
affect the performance of Sendmail.
Enabling identd on the Sendmail Server
You can enable identd on the Sendmail server by uncommenting the
following entry in the /etc/mail/sendmail.cf file:
#O Timeout.ident=5s
By default, the identd timeout value is 5 seconds.
You can disable identd to improve the performance of the system by
commenting out this entry. The following sections discuss disabling
identd:
• “Disabling identd on the Remote Client” on page 79
• “Disabling identd from the Sendmail Server” on page 80
Disabling identd on the Remote Client
You must comment out the following line in the /etc/inetd.conf file in
the client system, by placing a pound sign (#) in the first column as
follows:
#auth stream tcp wait bin /usr/lbin/identd identd
The previous command denotes an IPv4 enabled system. If the system is
IPv6 enabled, then you must comment out the following line:
#auth stream tcp6 wait bin /usr/lbin/identd identd
Then, execute the command inetd -c to restart the inetd daemon in
the client system, thereby forcing inetd to reread the inetd.conf file.