Re: cron-apt with no mta
On Mon, Nov 13, 2006 at 11:52:45AM -0500, Rob Bochan wrote:
> I'm interested in the cron-apt package.
> Is anyone aware if there's any way for it to send a message to an external
> mail (i.e. to a gmail account, etc.) without having an MTA installed on the
> machine? Perhaps some settings like the reportbug package does? I'm
> interesting in using it to keep machines up to date, but I have no intention
> of installing a mail server to do so.
Re MTA: Its hard to transport mail (even on the same box from one user
to another) without some sort of mail transporter. Anything that does
it is, or has builtin, by definition a mail transporter.
I use Exim. My ISP makes me do wiierd TLS stuff but other than that the
dpkg-configure of exim4 is dead simple, especially for local mail. Tell
it local mail only and it will not listen on external ports making it
quite secure. My main internet gateway that does the ISP dialup
including exim4 is a 486 with 32 MB ram. It used to have only 16 MB ram
but Mozilla kept dying. Exim needs diddly-sqat so don't worry about it
from a system load issue.
Any *NIX box that has users on it (as opposed to a blue-box router) that
doesn't have a MTA is seriously impaired. Your cron jobs, log scanner,
at-batch jobs, etc can't send you output.
If you need to have the box present a public face, you could have the
MTA send root mail to you on another box. This way, users' mail still
goes to them but they don't get the nasty rootish mail.
Doug.
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