On Saturday, June 01, 2013 05:34:22, Tollef Fog Heen wrote: > ]] Russ Allbery > > > Basically, what we're looking for here is the equivalent of a check > > engine light (except, of course, with better user-visible diagnostics > > available). That's what the end user actually wants: something clear and > > visible indicating that something is wrong, which they can drill down > > and see the details and dismiss the error condition if they want, or > > have all the details available to consult someone who knows more about > > computers if they don't know what to do with it themselves. > > Historically, root cron mail has been exactly that, and that's still a > > great way of handling it for servers, since that mail can be sent off > > somewhere centrally, analyzed and assigned to sysadmins, used to open > > internal trouble tickets, etc. > > I don't think it's a good way at all, since far too often, cron mails > aren't actionable. I'll get a mail from some automated process that > tried to run apt-get update and that failed (during the middle of the > night). Since that process runs every hour, it'll have succeeded > afterwards, and there's nothing I can do about the mail. > > I wish we had a better system where some, but not all errors would latch > and need acknowledgment, there would be correlation (between hosts and > between messages, so if the router's down, you get a message about data > centre A not being able to successfully complete $process, rather than a > zillion individual messages), there would be merging of identical > messages, so I get a message about $process being broken for the last > $time period (or having a failure rate above $threshold), rather than a > thousand mails because of some error. Ugh. :-/ Yeah these are good points. The thinking was to change notifications (a) for Desktop boxes only and (b) the messages "received" and needing acknowledgement being from the local machine only. However -- if there are many repeat events of some error that all have to be separately acknowledged, I can easily see how that could be very annoying. > Oh, and a pony. Don't forget the pony. Or an otter, I like otters. Otters are pretty cute looking. They remind me of gophers. -- Chris -- Chris Knadle Chris.Knadle@coredump.us GPG Key: 4096R/0x1E759A726A9FDD74
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