Re: design issues in debian packages
>>>>> "Russell" == Russell Coker <russell@coker.com.au> writes:
Russell> Sending lots of mail is bad. For small end-user systems
Russell> such as Brian's there is no guarantee that mail will be
Russell> read before the disk fills up (lots of people don't read
Russell> mail to root).
I was getting far too much mail sent to root to be able to keep up (I
think about 8-9 messages a day). Too many E-Mails increases the
chances of me missing something important. Even worse, is E-Mails
which don't get E-Mailed to root, but fill up valuable disk space
instead[1]. Cricket isn't the only offender, others include news
(sends daily reports to usenet). I think I once had problems with
emails to "list" (maybe when I had SmartList installed).
One big killer was my scripts which call modlogan - modlogan has a
special capability of finding log file entries it doesn't understand,
and making a big fuss about it. I have since redirected all output to
/dev/null (although I wonder how much I can really trust modlogan as a
result).
Fortunately, I have got back to 4 E-Mails a day:
fwanalog - have sent bug #125761.
news - it is not likely I will notice when it indicates a major
problem (like throttling due to lack of disk space), due to the number
of E-Mails I receive.
calamaris - I want this report
john - sends me daily E-Mails like:
-- BEGIN
From: root@snoopy.apana.org.au (Cron Daemon)
Subject: Cron <root@snoopy> test -e /usr/sbin/anacron || run-parts --report /etc/cron.daily
To: root@snoopy.apana.org.au
Date: Thu, 20 Dec 2001 06:37:40 +1100 (EST)
/etc/cron.daily/john:
guesses: 0 time: 0:00:00:00 100% c/s: 3978 trying: root1965 - root1969
Loaded 2 passwords with no different salts (Standard DES [48/64 4K])
0 messages sent
-- END
which obviously demonstrates that it is useless for my configuration
anyway, as it doesn't seem to understand that most my passwords are
stored in LDAP... So all it does is check that my root password is
secure, once a day...
Russell> For large setups such practices aren't viable either.
Russell> Consider a case where you have 50 servers running a
Russell> variety of programs administered by a team of a dozen
Russell> people. When a cron job runs wild and emails everyone it
Russell> doesn't gain anything as often such mail isn't read (some
Russell> companies I've worked for have had mail filters to stop
Russell> mail from applications that are known to send a lot
Russell> because of machines in other departments mail bombing),
At the moment I am redirecting all mail to cricket@snoopy to
/dev/null. Cool! Of course, this wont be a problem when I upgrade to
the latest cricket, so I will have to remember to change this to root.
Russell> and anyway if the program stops working then THAT will be
Russell> what causes it to be fixed not some error messages
Russell> anyway.
Thanks for the suggestion. I will have to try logcheck again.
Although when I last used it I found false alarms a problem. Looking
at <URL:http://bugs.debian.org/logcheck> seems to suggest that this is
still a problem, especially for postfix, anacron and squid...
Is there anything that can be done about these problems?
Note:
[1] which is technically a MTA setup issue I guess, as somebody could
SPAM, say <cricket@snoopy.apana.org.au> with similar results.
Ideally the MTA needs (in this case postfix) to realize some users
should never receive E-Mail and possibly forward it on to root.
--
Brian May <bam@debian.org>
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