On Sun, Dec 25, 2022 at 09:56:03AM +0000, Ibsen S Ripsbusker wrote: > I want to use the altroot facility, but I don't want to read the mails > about the the backup succeeding and nothing else failing. > > Reading the scripts and the manual pages, I see no support for sending > the daily, weekly, or monthly mails only on failure. I also see > no support for running ROOTBACKUP outside of the daily script. > Of course I could change the scripts, but I would rather not. > Also, once I receive the mail, I don't see an easy way to classify > it as having a failure or not. > > What do you do if you want to use the altroot facility (or some > other part of the periodic system maintenance scripts) and want > to read reports only when something failed? > > With great humility, > > Ibsen S. Ripsbusker >
so these scripts used to be very chatty. then there was a decision to cut the chatter unless it was asked for (via VERBOSESTATUS). then finally to not output anything if there was nothing to report (and VERBOSESTATUS was removed, as far as i can see). so to try to answer your question: i don;t think you will get any reports of anything succeeding, and you should only get reports about actions the scripts think neccessary. if you did get any "we've done it!" messages, i suppose you'd be entitled to complain. do you? the issue for me now is that i think that somewhere we should say this. i missed VERBOSESTATUS disappearing, but i think we might want to say it. the commit message was: ---------------------------- revision 1.29 date: 2020/10/20 22:42:29; author: danj; state: Exp; lines: +2 -19; commitid: EFsAssont5N9pxsI; Remove calls for df(1), netstat(1), and the verbose dump(1) With this change, daily(8) only sends email when something looks dubious. Consequently VERBOSESTATUS is now a no-op and may be unset. The code is trivial and riddled with choices that look like personal preferences. The old behavior can be achieved through /etc/daily.local. With schwarze@, tweak kn@, sthen@ OK schwarze@, kn@, jung@ ---------------------------- although it's maybe true that the old behaviour can be achieved via a *.local file, there's nothing that says how. i suppose the meaning was, if you want more info, add it yourself. still i think it makes sense to say not to expect mails if everything looks ok. sth like this: Index: daily.8 =================================================================== RCS file: /cvs/src/share/man/man8/daily.8,v retrieving revision 1.29 diff -u -p -r1.29 daily.8 --- daily.8 20 Oct 2020 22:42:29 -0000 1.29 +++ daily.8 25 Dec 2022 21:25:48 -0000 @@ -29,7 +29,8 @@ and are shell scripts run on a periodic basis by the clock daemon, .Xr cron 8 . They take care of some basic administrative tasks. -Their output, if any, is mailed to root. +If anything looks amiss, +a report is mailed to root. .Pp .Sy Note : The scripts are all run as part of root's
