-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On Wednesday, 2008-10-22 at 19:02 -0400, Anton Aylward wrote: Your mail did not reach the list. You need to subscribe first. Answering to selected parts only. If you want your full mail to be seen, then please mail it to the list yourself :-)
Carlos E. R. said the following on 10/22/2008 05:40 PM:
Then again cron might only be delivering locally - this used to be done with mailx - so why is smtp needed.
I suppose it uses the sendmail command to send, not mailx. And I understand that mailx uses the smtp server to send, anyway.
I'm new to SUSE but classically mailx was the LOCAL delivery agent that tools such as sendmail, exim and Postfix use. The other way round from what you are suggesting.
Er... in openSUSE, mailx was introduced about 2 or 3 years ago, and it is a MUA, mail user agent, aka mail client, that replaces the traditional "mail". It is not a local delivery agent. See "man mailx".
In reality, shouldn't cron deliver its error messages via syslog?
No, it can't, or you might find thousands of syslog entries coming from cron output. Would you prefer that?
It can - don't say "can't" about anything. Its a design decision. I can open up the code or cron and make it all run though syslog, which or an enterprise system makes more sense. If I want email notiicaiton I strap SWATCH onto syslog.
I would consider a bad design decision as worth of a "can't do" :-p
I know this is possible because I've done it on old UNIX, AIX, DG/UX, AIX ... as I say, its not a "can't", its a decision. This dependency shouldn't be "bolted in".
As for "thousands" of syslog entries - that also means cron would be producing thousands of emails.
I don't mean that. A job called by cron might produce an output of thousands lines, for a single job. In openSUSE that output (if configured, on error) goes to a single email. However, if you don't like that behavior, but you want a philosophy so contrary to the manner that SUSE has always done this, then you need another distro, or roll your own, IMO. SuSE is designed around certain design considerations, certain scripts are included and supposed to work, and they need certain programs and services to be installed.
irewall system, which is useful. I get messages from the authentication subsystem and much else, which on my laptop is quite irrelevant, its not as if I'm short on disk space. And they get rolled over by cron!
You can configure that. Its the logrotate configuration.
The delivery doesn't have to be by mail - though it could with local delivery. I could be by a message sent to a window or a pop-up.
Certainly not! It would not work for headless machines or text only machines, or machines where the administrator is not logged it.
The issue here is that if cron and others are not bolted in to mail then they don't have to deliver notification by mail. if I *do* want to receive notification by mail I'll set that up with SWATCH.
I really hate all these dependencies that arise out of lack of consideration of alternatives.
Then perhaps you should design a distro with those premises >:-)
Why? I'm not in the business.
Then select another distro that does it your way :-)
Unless we point this out and ask or it, its not going to happen.
Then ask for it officially, in Bugzilla.
I say "I'm not in the business" and I mean that. I don't have the time to do the level of re-engineering for an "Anton's Distribution". But if the guys at Novell pay attention and decouple many more things like this we can all benefit.
I don't think that will happen. Fortunately (IMO)! >:-) - -- Cheers, Carlos E. R. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2.0.9 (GNU/Linux) iEYEARECAAYFAkj/wDQACgkQtTMYHG2NR9VfzACfazfm1PRy3hvT51i2sc23UZeM YLQAoI8vTSF2rDNKrPuqmBlVkOx8xZii =Ew8A -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org