On Wed, 2005-03-02 at 12:11 -0800, darren kirby wrote:
> quoth the ME:
> > On my Redhat systems, when I open a root shell and have the message "You
> > have new mail in /root", I just type "mail" and there I am reading the
> > messages on the command line.
> > Moreover, I am not able to find the messages! I looked under /root,
> > under /var and did not find any (I might just be missing them, but I
> > suspect they are not getting where they should).
> Well, to put in my 2cents, what I do is edit the /etc/mail/aliases file so
> that root's mail resolves to my normal user account and read it there...
> Why screw around with two different clients just to read your cron report?
Despite the availability of more secure authentication methods for
reading mail, it is common for (pop3 especially) mail clients to send
the username and password in the clear. If you're trying to read your
root mail on a machine across the network, that exposes your root
password. Also, if someone wanted to try to brute-force discover the
root password on your machine, attacking the pop3 server is one possible
place to try. Because of that, some mailservers will NOT deliver mail to
root, or allow root to authenticate and check mail, even if you wanted
to. Also note, if you haven't installed an actual mailserver, cron and
everything else will not have any way to send mail anywhere. The "ssmtp"
package sets up a simplistic mail relay that'll allow local apps to send
mail to localhost and ssmtp just forwards it to a real mail server
somewhere else. But you'll need to tell even it where to send your
"root" emails.
--
Scott Taylor - <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
BOFH Excuse #390:
Increased sunspot activity.
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