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

Chris Murphy lists at colorremedies.com
Thu Jan 2 23:48:58 UTC 2014


On Jan 2, 2014, at 2:32 PM, Lars E. Pettersson <lars at homer.se> wrote:

> On 01/02/2014 10:08 PM, Chris Murphy wrote:
>>> 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.
> 
> I meant how big files, i.e. content, can you send to the journal, not the size of journal itself.

It accepts a stream with a configurable rate limiter.

> 
>>> 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.
> 
> Well, to be picky, you was informed, but you did not know were to look for the information you was informed about.

No, if I'm informed, by definition, I have the knowledge. What's happened is some informational message was placed in a location that I don't know about, and that is not "being informed" at all.

> This is (was) a lack in the documentation of Fedora. If this had been documented, you could have set up /etc/aliases and gotten informed.

Even if I set up /etc/aliases I'm not informed if I don't use the local system to receive emails. And even if I do, it's not going to send those emails to gmail is it?


> But if this information now instead ends up in the journal, how to inform the user to look there?

I think if you're a regular user who uses a desktop, anything important needs to feed alerts to the desktop's notification system. If you're a sysadmin, use something like Nagios.

> But how do we do this in the use case of a home server? The user may not log into a graphical account that often. So how do we inform the user then?

And for that matter, they may rarely log into that computer, and requiring them to do so to receive "important" messages is a flawed design. So again, something like Nagios. Pretty much anything except emails.

Chris Murphy


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