Apparently I installed that thing in 2006 and I last updated it in 2016, then I quit updating it for some reason that I totally forgot. Probably laziness…
It’s been running for quite some time and we kind of forgot about it in the closet, until the SSH tunnel we use to get our mail outside our home stopped working because modern openssh clients refuse to use the antiquated key cipher I setup client machines with way back when any longer.
I just generated new keys with a more modern cipher that it understands (ecdsa-sha2-nistp256) and left it running. Because why not 🙂
Because security.
It’s behind a firewall. The only thing exposed to the outside is port 22 - and only pubkey login too.
And gee dude… It’s been running for 18 years without being pwned 🙂
It hasnt been pwned so far
For that matter, it hasn’t been ransomwared. There are so many ways to hide a compromise.
How do you know?
There’s a file called /pwnedornot and it contains “no, you’re safe bro”
Mine does
And it’s not like it contains any sensitive information. I’m sure all your emails are just friendly correspondence with your pen pal.
I’d still maybe build a modern OpenSSH package.
There’s been an awful lot of RCEs in the past two decades and uh, if that’s rawdogging the internet, I’m honestly shocked you haven’t been hit with any by now.
Eh, building anything modern on a system that old would be painful I bet.
Maybe you could use https://github.com/openssh/openssh-portable since that’s meant to be portable. I’d certainly would give it a try if I didn’t want to bother trying to upgrade that system. Then again, trying to upgrade it through the releases to a modern Debian might be fun too.
How do you know? Do you constantly monitor running processes, performance and network connections?
sorry, but what kind of email server listens only on SSH?
The most secure ones
How do you know? OpenSSH is pretty good but it isn’t impenetrable. Especially for almost 10 years.
Did you really only use it when you were home? If you used it outside the firewall then port 25 must have been open also.
I used to run my own server and this was in the early 90s. Then one day, perusing the logs I realized I was not smart enough on the security front to even attempt such a thing. It was quickly shut down and the MX record moved to an outsourced mail provider.
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Very very aware.
So you had another mail server elsewhere that port forwarded port 25 via port 22 to your internal mail server’s port 25.
I take it that outside mail server was secure.
That’s an impressive setup.
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Where is the mail server getting incoming mail from?
Stop nuking comments pussy
That’s not what a SSH is. A ssh tunnel only allows traffic after a successful SSH authentication.