On 2014-08-19 18:29, Anton Aylward wrote:
And other reasons, like learning to use postfix, which I use for sending, too, and to add other things like amavis.
Yes, did all that. But like James, Rogers imposes a restriction. I can't run a server, web or SMTP.
That's nasty of them. I would switch provider. (the law in Spain mandates that there be more than one Internet provider in any place)
Rogrs is my cable ISP provider. They supply the model and give out a DHCP address. Yes I know out things like DynDNS. They also perform scans and if they find a listening SMTP or http server they send a notice asking you to remove it OR ELSE YOUR SERVICE WILL BE TERMINATED ! ! !
And they would see my ports closed. Yes, I do use postfix to send, but not to receive. Nowdays I do not even send directly to destinations, it is next to impossible: I just have postfix configured to send to the appropriate relays with authentication. It works out much better than letting Thunderbird or Alpine do the sending directly (they return control immediately).
So there's not much point me running a SMTP listener. Like James I get all my mail from mailboxes, either at Rogers or at a domain I own or ... Elsewhere.
Like me. :-) But I can run an SMTP listener any time I wish - with the caveat that the IP changes often, so there is not much point in it. I could use it, if I so wished, to send mail directly to friends bypassing any mail server and thus /limiting/ eavesdropping. Mail servers in this country are mandated to keep records of the headers of any email that crosses their servers, for a year, I think. And they hate it, because of the cost of keeping those records. So if you bypass them, they don't have legal records. They can have illegal records, obtained by tapping the pipes instead... but that is not done by the ISP, but by the CIA.
might contain. My POV is 'why keep logs unless you are inspecting them?'.
Because when there is a problem, and they come, eventually, I want to find out why, later.
So, since you are not continuously watching your logs, you have some other way of noticing that there is a problem that has nothing to do with the logs.
Yes, I notice that there WAS a problem, and then I go looking into the logs to find out what happened, instead of having to guess and recreate the conditions to find out what went wrong.
It doesn't waste any of my time to just "have logs". Just some disk space.
And disk space is cheap. But if you never read the logs ...
You don't know that. I do watch them. I have a terminal running "tailf /var/log/warn" all the time, and I look at it now and then. I'm that curious. It was there where I found out instantly why dovecot-lda wasn't working, after learning in this thread about it. Sometimes I have a problem, say a big crash, and I find the root cause a week before in the logs... with no logs, I'd be clueless about what caused the crash. But in the machines that I'm not watching, on in the machines of other people, I have to look in the logs to find out what *went* wrong maybe days ago, because they ask me to investigate. You can see that here in the lists and forums, that often we need looking at the logs; but as they are long, we have to guess at what to find and tell the poster what to look for.
Back to my point about 'artificial ignorance'. The killer with logs is the volume you have to wade though. The 'disk space is cheap' philosophy actually makes the job harder since there is the temptation to 'log everything'. The wonderful thing about syslog is that I turn up the sensitivity and only get WARNING or higher. Actually most of the time I can like with ERROR or higher.
I can log everything, and then automatically delete everything after a week or a year. No problem. That is how it is configured by default on openSUSE, the logs are automatically deleted after some time. If you use the journal from systemd, it only persist for a session, unless you add another package that stores them in disk (I forget the name now). But it is close to useless because searching on it is horribly slow on rotating disks. -- Cheers / Saludos, Carlos E. R. (from 13.1 x86_64 "Bottle" at Telcontar)