F20 - Unintended consequences of no default MTA - How best to fix

[Chris Murphy]

On Jan 2, 2014, at 1:50 PM, "Lars E. Pettersson" <lars at homer.se> wrote:

> On 01/02/2014 09:45 PM, Chris Murphy wrote:
>> If they're important, they should go in the journal.
> 
> How big files can you send to the journal? The content we are talking about can be everything from oneliners to really long tracebacks.

By default it is compressed, and set to use 10% of free space. It's configurable, man journald.conf.

> 
> If it ends up in the journal, how will the user be informed that the content is in the journal and should (perhaps) be acted upon?

On Fedora 19 and older, when sendmail was the default, I was not ever informed of such things. Therefore the default installation of an MTA is orthogonal to actually successfully informing the user of anything.

If you want to do this correctly, you need a notification API. And I think Gnome at least has something like this now. For things like hard drives that die in a raid5, I see a banner alerting me of this fact, by default, in Gnome Shell. I don't know how that works but I don't think it's smartd that uses this API and informs Gnome. I think Gnome has it's own monitoring of such things. So either the program you want monitored needs to support such an API so it can issue a message for user notification in certain instances. Or maybe you need a configurable journal monitoring service that triggers notifications when certain priority messages appear in the journal.


Chris Murphy