# Weird exim banner

## mcfish

Hi,

 for some reason one of my exim 4.72 servers shows it's banner as stars, and I have no idea why. 

 If I open telnet to port 25 from localhost or from machine on the same subnet, server gives the following response:

```
Connected to localhost.

Escape character is '^]'.

220 Exim banner goes here

```

which is correct .. But if I telnet to port 25 outside the network, I get the following response:

```
Connected to mail.xxx.xxx.

Escape character is '^]'.

220 ***********************

```

* changing the smtp banner doesn't help (it just changes the number of stars)

* rebuilding exim doesn't help

* I even tried to look for rootkits using chkrootkit and rkhunter .. and found.. nothing

Server is running kernel 2.6.30 (gentoo-sources) and exim has been compiled with gcc 4.3.4 and 4.4.4 (makes no difference)

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## cdstealer

do you get anything in /var/log/exim/main.log or reject.log or panic.log?  It may be something amiss in your exim.conf.

Can you provide an edited version of your config?

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## mcfish

panic.log is empty and reject.log/main.log contain only "normal" entries, nothing which would indicate this kind of behavior. And other than the banner issue, exim works fine.

Use flags for exim are: "dkim exiscan-acl gnutls ipv6 mysql pam perl ssl tcpd" .. I'll post configurations as soon as I have time to clean them.

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