Installation and Configuration
To install the software, unzip the zipfile to a folder on your system.
The software comes with a number of configuration files, which
appear in the installation folder. You should make some changes to
these files before running the software in earnest; if all the
instances of Jackpot were identically-configured, then the software
that spammers use to find open relays could be adapted to
fingerprint Jackpot honeypots, and exclude them. There are two main
ways to do this:
- Edit the file jackpot.properties.
This is a textfile containing a number of key/value pairs, where the
value is a string that Jackpot uses as a response to various different
commands issued by the spammer. There are comments in this file indicating
what kinds of edits make sense. In general, you cannot 'break' the software
by editing this file (but you could make render your honeypot very easy to
distinguish from a real open relay).
- If you know how to program in Java, even just a little bit, and you
have a Java Development Kit (JDK), you can create a Java class that will
automatically be loaded by Jackpot at startup, and will replace some of
the logic in the program, making it even harder for spammers to tell
that they are looking at Jackpot, rather than a conventional SMTP
server. If you want to try this,
contact me.
If you are running Win98, then you should use Jackpot.bat to launch Jackpot.
You can use this file also on WinNT or Win2K, but you might prefer to use the
shortcut jackpot.run. Right-click on this shortcut, edit the working folder to
point to the folder where you unzipped Jackpot files, and change the icon to
point to honey.ico in that folder.
Jackpot's console window will then have a nice honeypot icon, instead of the
default black-screen icon.
Once Jackpot is running, you can access the Web-server to examine captured spam
and administer the running program by pointing your browser at
http://servername:http-port/html/. To access admin services, you will need a userid
and password.
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