> Bear in mind that the mail command isbasically a wrapper for sendmail > when used thus: > > echo some messages | mail -s 'some mail' [EMAIL PROTECTED] > > If [EMAIL PROTECTED] cannot he reached immediately, where does the mail go?
The command exits with a non-zero return code, and the application invoking it is required to cope with the error and try a different method of signaling a problem. If it doesn't cope, the message is lost. Remember the basic assumption was that he *didn't* want to run a full MTA all the time. Starting with that assumption, you have to give up some of the niceties of a full MTA daemon, like queuing and automated retries, because there isn't any process there to DO the queuing or retries. If immediate delivery fails, your application has to make the call on what to do about it -- the MTA isn't there to defer things for you. > If you have a working relay, fine, but if someone tripped over the wire, > what then? That's precisely the argument for installing a smaller, less complex, less resource intensive full MTA (like exim/postfix) running in daemon mode in place of sendmail OR (better yet) not relying at all on a complex system like email for alert notifications, but that's not what he wanted. If you run your MTA in non-daemon mode, one consequence of that decision is that your smarthost better be more reliable than you are if you want email notifications to work reliably. That's one of the tradeoffs for not consuming the resources of a full queuing MTA on each guest. Personally, I'd log stuff like that to syslog using logger rather than using mail. Scales better, is a lot lighter weight than any of the MTAs even in non-daemon mode, allows concentration/correlation of automation and distribution of event notifications, and most of the good system management tools already read and parse syslog output without inventing any new wheels. It's also a lot harder to break syslogd.conf in stupid ways than *any* of the MTA configuration files. -- db ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390
