Fedora keeps sendmail — for now

Posted Aug 1, 2013 14:03 UTC (Thu) by drago01 (subscriber, #50715)
In reply to: Fedora keeps sendmail — for now by jezuch
Parent article: Fedora keeps sendmail — for now

> Why is that?

Because those mails are mostly noise.

Fedora keeps sendmail — for now

Posted Aug 1, 2013 17:24 UTC (Thu) by isilmendil (subscriber, #80522) [Link] (4 responses)

> > Why is that?
> Because those mails are mostly noise.

Yes, I also hate it when boring messages like "Your harddrive is dying" disturb my concentration. *g*

Fedora keeps sendmail — for now

Posted Aug 1, 2013 19:42 UTC (Thu) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link] (3 responses)

I like it when reports like "your hard drive is dying" are only filed in a disused mail box in a basement where the lights have gone out along with the stairs and the door has a sign on it saying "Beware of Leopard".

Surely there is a better place for this information than /var/spool/mail which no one sees by default. Either set up a forward for root mail as part of the install or make those reports go somewhere where they are likely to be seen. Anything which requires actual action from the end user should probably result in a notification event going out over the dbus.

Fedora keeps sendmail — for now

Posted Aug 1, 2013 21:26 UTC (Thu) by drago01 (subscriber, #50715) [Link] (1 responses)

For this particular case you get a desktop notification in GNOME (not sure about other desktops).

Fedora keeps sendmail — for now

Posted Aug 2, 2013 8:03 UTC (Fri) by jezuch (subscriber, #52988) [Link]

> For this particular case you get a desktop notification in GNOME (not sure about other desktops).

KDE sets up some monitoring of syslog as well. At least kernel oopses are rerouted to the desktop notifications panel.

Fedora keeps sendmail — for now

Posted Aug 2, 2013 6:47 UTC (Fri) by nhippi (subscriber, #34640) [Link]

Having a email message "your hard drive is dying" stored on the very hard drive that is dying is kind of pointless. Yes you could have configured email notification delivery to email box elsewhere, but you might as well have configured nagios.

I find it very telling that nobody has even mentioned mailing other users of the machine as the use case of local sendmail. The boat of local email delivery has sailed and reached it's destination at the harbour of UNIX museum. If the only remaining use of sendmail is to deliver notifications, I don't see why it should be treated different from nagios.

Fedora keeps sendmail — for now

Posted Aug 2, 2013 8:00 UTC (Fri) by jezuch (subscriber, #52988) [Link]

> Because those mails are mostly noise.

I don't see any noise there.

(Well, OK, at the moment I do because I disabled some service that installs a cron schedule to restart it every hour but it fails every hour, because it's disabled, and I get a message every hour that the scheduled action failed. But that's a rare exception.)

Basically the only thing I get there are denyhosts reports and apt-listchanges summaries. My hard drives are not dying yet ;)