Default-installed MTA (was Re: MTA virtual provides craziness)

[Peter Robinson]

On Mon, May 20, 2013 at 8:36 PM, Reindl Harald <h.reindl at thelounge.net> wrote:
>
>
> Am 20.05.2013 21:30, schrieb Peter Robinson:
>>> I suggest not, because in most cases reviewing syslogs requires local
>>> root privilege. Alert or warning emails are easily configured with
>>> aliases or "MAILTO" settings for cron jobs to go somewhere safer and
>>> less security sensitive, even somewhere offsite, with much less work.
>>
>> by default all mail messages go to root which you need root
>> permissions to access them so it's not really an argument
>
> and on most setups i know /etc/aliases contains
> "root: whoever at domain.tld" and the *main* difference
> is that you have to search in your logs manually and
> mails are coming if whatever event happened directly
> to your inbox

You still have to configure it so doing a "yum install
your-mta-of-choice" isn't hard and in fact in all environments I know
of that have auto monitoring and alerting of drive failures configure
it automatically as part of a kickstart or puppet deployment and use
snmp rather than email to deal with that and have active alert
systems.

> if a disk dies it is nice to have it in syslog but
> it is useless if you see it days later while a mail
> from crond is more or less real time

You still have to configure all of that and whether a MTA is installed
automatically or not doesn't really make it work out of the box.

> until you watched the event in the syslog other
> people have replaced the drive long ago, where i
> work it takes 3-5 hours to get a spare drive

Where I work the manufacturer ships a person with the new drive and
they deal with it. It's a mute point though, auto alerting whether by
mail or snmp needs other configuration of which a "yum install MTA" or
adding of a MTA into a kickstart isn't exactly a hard task.

Peter