Darn, Isn't it always the case when you mail something off after scratching your head for a while you stumble upon some new relevant piece of information.
Just added to my daily.local a regular cp command to copy out the mail log for manual inspection. Ran it as a test from the command line and mail reported that the message was empty. When I examined the temporary file it had only one line saying that the log had been rotated... I thought this is strange since the rotation happened at 3am last night. Examined /var/log/maillog using more and sure enough there were messages so I ran the script again and this time it worked. It looks like maillog isn't actually being flushed for some reason until a specific type of read operation is occurring on the log. - maybe this is wrong but it looks that way. I could work around this by zcat'ing the rotated log to sma but now I am curious about the log flush post rotate. -Andy -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Andrew Smith Sent: 10 July 2006 10:16 To: [email protected] Subject: really strange issue running sma from daily.local I think this must be a misc issue rather than a ports issue but the issue concerns the use of mail/sma in /etc/daily.local. For several days I have had /etc/daily.local set up to run sma to produce an ascii summary of /var/log/maillog as follows.. sma -a /var/log/maillog > /tmp/maillog.out mail -s "Daily sendmail analysis" root < /tmp/maillog.out rm /tmp/maillog.out This invariably produces an empty maillog.out file when run from the standard cron job. I popped in various diagnostic steps including copying maillog to maillog.dummy just to verify that the executable could process files when run from cron (making sure that the rights and owner mirrored maillog exactly and I got the dummy output but no actual output from the real maillog. I also made sure that newsyslog was scheduled to rotate /var/log/maillog at a specific time rather than at a particular interval by changing the when field in /etc/newsyslog.conf from 24 to $D03 for a 3am daily execution in the belief that sma was actually seeing an empty file when it was run. - Still no joy. Any thoughts folks? -Andy
