Re: F20 System Wide Change: No Default Sendmail

2013-07-25 Thread Lars E. Pettersson

On 07/22/2013 08:30 PM, Lennart Poettering wrote:

Well, assuming people use the local machine for reading their mails, and
not Thunderbird or so and not GMail and so on, or Zimbra or whatever
else people actually read mails with these days... None of these even do
local message reading.


Thunderbird reads spool mail. You also have mailx for those that really 
want it that way.


I am not sure of other MUA but doesn't they also read spool mail? 
Evolution did last I used it.


And if you use a web based MUA, you simply change the line starting with 
root in /etc/aliases and run mewaliases, and the mail turns up in the 
web mail system.


Again, the output is not lost.

One thing though, /etc/aliases ought to be updated with information on 
who should get system mail during installation. This part is missing, 
which creates the illusion that the output is lost.



By ensuring all logs go to the normal
log stream there's a much better chance of not losing messages...


The problem is that this data can be quite voluminous. Perhaps a bad
thing to clog up the logs with that?


Emails due to base64 encoding usually increase everything by 4/3, which
is certainly worse.


But those emails does not end up in the log, do they? What I am hinting 
on is the voluminous messages normally sent to root, that you want to 
deliver to the logs instead.


The mail messages sent to root, or whoever you send it to, can be quite 
voluminous. I use yum-cron and today got the following message. How 
would this be handled by the log/journal/whatever?


Lars


/etc/cron.hourly/0yum-hourly.cron:

Delta RPMs reduced 8.9 M of updates to 2.6 M (71% saved)
Finishing delta rebuilds of 8 package(s) (8.5 M)
The following updates will be applied on xxx.yyy.zzz.se:

 Package Arch Version   Repository 
Size


Updating:
 brlapi  x86_64   0.6.0-6.fc19  updates 
   110 k
 brltty  x86_64   4.5-6.fc19updates 
   910 k
 cifs-utils  x86_64   6.1-3.fc19updates 
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 libtirpcx86_64   0.2.3-3.fc19  updates 
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 libwayland-client   x86_64   1.2.0-1.fc19  updates 
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 libwayland-cursor   x86_64   1.2.0-1.fc19  updates 
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 libwayland-server   x86_64   1.2.0-1.fc19  updates 
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 libwbclient x86_64   2:4.0.7-2.fc19updates 
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 netpbm  x86_64   10.61.02-5.fc19   updates 
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 netpbm-progsx86_64   10.61.02-5.fc19   updates 
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 pygobject3  x86_64   3.8.3-1.fc19  updates 
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 pygobject3-base x86_64   3.8.3-1.fc19  updates 
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 python-brlapi   x86_64   0.6.0-6.fc19  updates 
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 python3-brlapi  x86_64   0.6.0-6.fc19  updates 
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 python3-gobject x86_64   3.8.3-1.fc19  updates 
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 samba-clientx86_64   2:4.0.7-2.fc19updates 
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 samba-commonx86_64   2:4.0.7-2.fc19updates 
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 samba-libs  x86_64   2:4.0.7-2.fc19updates 
   4.1 M


Transaction Summary

Upgrade  19 Packages
The updates were successfully applied


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Re: F20 System Wide Change: No Default Sendmail

2013-07-24 Thread drago01
On Tue, Jul 23, 2013 at 6:52 PM, Billy Crook billycr...@gmail.com wrote:
 On Tue, Jul 23, 2013 at 10:51 AM, Matthew Miller
 mat...@fedoraproject.org wrote:
 On Tue, Jul 23, 2013 at 10:18:47AM -0500, Billy Crook wrote:
  Since it _isn't_ served via DHCP in any environment I'm aware of, that's 
  not
  actually useful.
 Nice to meet you Matt.  As of this morning, it is served via DHCP in
 mine.  There's also that guy earlier in the thread.  So now you know
 of two.  Perhaps that dhcp option ought to be in the packaged
 dhcpd.conf template.

 You've totally removed the context here. Which cloud environment do you run?

 Actually I'm afraid your cloud environment example is just as far out
 of context.  I can't imagine many cloud deployments that don't use
 kickstarts and have their own individually chosen packageset tuned for
 exactly their business case.  They can use core / minimal +  whatever
 specific individual packages they need.  I hardly think a cloud
 environment is going to base their production on the Default package
 set.

 Default should include what people 'generally expect of a GNU+Linux
 system' -- and that includes an MTA.

Citation needed. Given that one very distribution with a very big
userbase don't install an MTA by default ...
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Re: F20 System Wide Change: No Default Sendmail

2013-07-24 Thread Nicolas Mailhot

Le Mer 24 juillet 2013 08:30, drago01 a écrit :
 On Tue, Jul 23, 2013 at 6:52 PM, Billy Crook billycr...@gmail.com wrote:

 Default should include what people 'generally expect of a GNU+Linux
 system' -- and that includes an MTA.

 Citation needed. Given that one very distribution with a very big
 userbase don't install an MTA by default ...

But does its users expect a GNU+Linux system nowadays?

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Re: F20 System Wide Change: No Default Sendmail

2013-07-24 Thread Oron Peled

On Monday 22 July 2013 20:18:04 Matthew Miller wrote:
 On Tue, Jul 23, 2013 at 03:14:32AM +0300, Oron Peled wrote:
  BTW: nobody ever answered how desktop users are supposed to read the
  
   output of their cron-jobs (they don't have permissions to read logs).
 
 They do have permissions to read journal entries that come from their
 userid.

1. Thanks, I've seen Lennart's reply regarding this in a separate sub-thread
   (boy, it's getting hard to follow this topic)

2. But as I've shown in my reply to him, cron-jobs output is not logged
   to this personal log, but rather to the system-wide log which isn't
   readable by regular users.

So although the per-user syslog feature is really good, it doesn't
apply to the case at hand.

Do you have a real (i.e: working) solution for users to read the
output of their own cron-jobs (besides mail of course).

Without this, you propose to cut an important functionality from
almost everyone (default).

Instead, let's remove MTA from *minimal* install, but not from *default*.

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Re: F20 System Wide Change: No Default Sendmail

2013-07-24 Thread Oron Peled

On Tuesday 23 July 2013 02:34:25 Lennart Poettering wrote:
 On Tue, 23.07.13 03:14, Oron Peled (o...@actcom.co.il) wrote:
  BTW: nobody ever answered how desktop users are supposed to read the
   output of their cron-jobs (they don't have permissions to read logs).
 Actually, if you'd look closely it has been answered 3 times now,
 already, just on this thread.

This turned out into a huge forest of QA. I've read your reply to my other 
mail, just after sending my BTW:... reply to another -- sorry.

However, if you've read my response you know the question wasn't really 
answered -- regular users only access to the output of their cron-jobs
is still via email. Cron currently logs the output to the system-wide
syslog which isn't accessible to regular users (just try it yourself
I've tested it on F19).

So as I've replied Matthew Miller few minutes ago: do you have
a real (working) solution for this? If not, it's premature
to remove MTA's from default install.

That's without even touching the totally different use-cases for
logs and email in general.

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Re: F20 System Wide Change: No Default Sendmail

2013-07-24 Thread Lennart Poettering
On Mon, 22.07.13 19:33, Reindl Harald (h.rei...@thelounge.net) wrote:

 Am 22.07.2013 18:29, schrieb Lennart Poettering:
  If you want to centralize system configuration, rather then services,
  then go ahead and do, that, but actually centralize *the configuration*,
  not the service. In particular, because a centralized client-side SMTP
  service is a really questionnable thing on today's Internet where SMTP
  delivery connections are almost always authenticated by a *user* id
 
 which could be *easy* solved by ask the users SMTP and credentials
 at the installation, setup /etc/aliases as default forwarding the
 messages to this address and configure SASL authentication

The second part of my mail that you conveniently removed actually
explains why that doesn't work: because the SASL auth is inherently
per-user configuration but in sendmail you can configure it only
globally for the client side.

There is a major mismatch between per-user credentials which you need
for SMTP SASL and the per-system instance of sendmail.

Lennart

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Re: F20 System Wide Change: No Default Sendmail

2013-07-24 Thread Jóhann B. Guðmundsson

On 07/23/2013 10:18 AM, Marcela Mašláňová wrote:


As a part of cronie upstream I should probably answer. Cron was 
patched long time ago to log into syslog if mail can't be send. There 
is also option for using syslog by default.


Should we change cron to be using syslog by default if this feature gets 
approved?


JBG
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Re: F20 System Wide Change: No Default Sendmail

2013-07-24 Thread Lennart Poettering
On Tue, 23.07.13 04:03, Oron Peled (o...@actcom.co.il) wrote:

   Cron was already mentioned, but every one seem to ignore the fact that
   regular users don't have permission to read system logs.
  
  journald actually splits out user logs and use filesystem ACLs to ensure
  that the user gets read access to his own logs. This doesn't work for
  syslog (and also not if cron first collects all logs and then logs them
  as root).
 
 [thanks for referring to this issue. In a separate sub-thread I complained
  about not being addressed before seeing this mail]
 
 There are two issues however:
  * The log-splitting of journald is really nice feature. But it doesn't
work for cron:
 $ echo '* * * * * /bin/echo Test output from cron' | \
  crontab '-'# than wait a minute
 $ journalctl# only shows crontab, not the cron output
 $ su -
 # journalctl# Cron output is properly shown.
 
So this issue is still outstanding (but I'll bet you knew that)

Also as mentioned on this thread, this doesn't work for cron right now
as cron actually collects all log output of a job and then posts it
under its own identity, which is why it is attributed to cron/root.

THis is, if you so will, a misdesign in cronie.

  * Logs are inherently line-oriented (which is very good for their
intended use case). However, many cron-jobs produce various reports
which are multi-line in their nature -- not a very good fit.

The journal is fine with multi-line log messages. In fact, the kernel by
default sends out a couple of multi-line messages.

Cron currently collects all the job's logs in one go and then writes
them under its own identity in one big transaction out. THis means that there's
no way to get live access to the logs of current long-running
jobs. Which is certainly suboptimal.

Note that due to the context we collect of messages it should be
preferable these days if logging happens immediately per-line and then
is recombined at display time, rather than collected and done at the
end, simply to make sure latencies are low, and you get a live view into
the system.

But either way, both philosophies (log individual log lines immediately
+ log them all in one) work fine with journald, we can do
both, better than syslog ever could.

Lennart

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Re: F20 System Wide Change: No Default Sendmail

2013-07-24 Thread Lennart Poettering
On Tue, 23.07.13 11:52, Billy Crook (billycr...@gmail.com) wrote:

 Default should include what people 'generally expect of a GNU+Linux
 system' -- and that includes an MTA.  It should include a syslog, and
 it should include screen too for that matter.

This is the let's do this out of tradition argument. It's an awful
argument. Just doing stuff because things were always done that way
essentially boils down to I hate change. Which is an OK opinion to
have, but certainly not four Fedora, where the four Fs mean Freedom,
Friends, Features, First. The First indicates that we should be
pioneers, and *not* the guys who never change because we are deeply
suspicous of any change that is against our tradition.

This is particularly a bad argument as most Linux distribution
installations do not include an MTA anymore (Ubuntu is substantially
more popular than Fedora, and not just on the desktop). There's enough
reason to believe that the what people expect from a Linux
distribution might be very different these days from what *you* expect
from it. 

Lennart

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Re: F20 System Wide Change: No Default Sendmail

2013-07-24 Thread Marcela Mašláňová

On 07/24/2013 01:11 PM, Jóhann B. Guðmundsson wrote:

On 07/23/2013 10:18 AM, Marcela Mašláňová wrote:



As a part of cronie upstream I should probably answer. Cron was
patched long time ago to log into syslog if mail can't be send. There
is also option for using syslog by default.


Should we change cron to be using syslog by default if this feature gets
approved?

JBG


Why? If you don't have MTA, it doesn't try to send email. I won't plan 
change anything.


Marcela
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Re: F20 System Wide Change: No Default Sendmail

2013-07-24 Thread Nicolas Mailhot

Le Mer 24 juillet 2013 13:11, Lennart Poettering a écrit :

 The second part of my mail that you conveniently removed actually
 explains why that doesn't work: because the SASL auth is inherently
 per-user configuration but in sendmail you can configure it only
 globally for the client side.

Then replace sendmail with something better.

http://www.postfix.org/postconf.5.html#smtp_sender_dependent_authentication

Here, done, time elapsed: 1 min googling.

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Re: F20 System Wide Change: No Default Sendmail

2013-07-24 Thread Nicolas Mailhot

Le Mer 24 juillet 2013 13:39, Lennart Poettering a écrit :

 This is particularly a bad argument as most Linux distribution
 installations do not include an MTA anymore (Ubuntu is substantially
 more popular than Fedora, and not just on the desktop). There's enough
 reason to believe that the what people expect from a Linux
 distribution might be very different these days from what *you* expect
 from it.

Anyway what people expect is a bad argument fullstop. Microsoft, Google
and Apple didn't grow their userbase by matching their users expectations.
They grew their userbase by exceeding those expectations. So what if in a
traditional windows 3.1 mindset smtp processing had not place on a
desktop? The fact is that mail is a major part of the internet experience
now, and anything that makes mail simpler on Fedora desktops will get us
more marketshare not less.

Just set up mail accounts at install/user creation time and configure our
tools to use the local smtpd server by default. That will make it a
sending mail just works distro-wide feature, instead of we suck so much
at mail we've disabled mail even where it was blatantly useful
misfeature.

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Re: F20 System Wide Change: No Default Sendmail

2013-07-24 Thread Robert Nichols

On 07/22/2013 05:36 PM, Lennart Poettering wrote:

Also, cronie will split up the messages
by line anyway if it logs to syslog instead of sendmail.


That sounds particularly horrible for concurrent cron jobs that would
thus have their output interleaved in the log.

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Re: F20 System Wide Change: No Default Sendmail

2013-07-24 Thread Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek
On Wed, Jul 24, 2013 at 02:11:18PM +0200, Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
 
 Le Mer 24 juillet 2013 13:11, Lennart Poettering a écrit :
 
  The second part of my mail that you conveniently removed actually
  explains why that doesn't work: because the SASL auth is inherently
  per-user configuration but in sendmail you can configure it only
  globally for the client side.
 
 Then replace sendmail with something better.
 
 http://www.postfix.org/postconf.5.html#smtp_sender_dependent_authentication
Doesn't this require creating an account on the server for those
administrative jobs and either turning off authentication when sending
mail, or storing authentication credentials for each of those mail
accounts in the postfix config file?

 Here, done, time elapsed: 1 min googling.
Great. But does this really solve anything except refuting the most
immediate statement by Lennart, taken out of context?

Zbyszek
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Re: F20 System Wide Change: No Default Sendmail

2013-07-24 Thread Billy Crook
On Wed, Jul 24, 2013 at 8:58 AM, Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek
zbys...@in.waw.pl wrote:
 Here, done, time elapsed: 1 min googling.
 Great. But does this really solve anything except refuting the most
 immediate statement by Lennart, taken out of context?

'Context' does not ameliorate a foundation of false statements,
however 'immediate' they are.

Anyway, this issue (and syslog) are up for vote, today, in
#fedora-meeting on freenode at 1800 UTC, right?
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Re: F20 System Wide Change: No Default Sendmail

2013-07-24 Thread Nicolas Mailhot

Le Mer 24 juillet 2013 15:58, Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek a écrit :
 On Wed, Jul 24, 2013 at 02:11:18PM +0200, Nicolas Mailhot wrote:

 Le Mer 24 juillet 2013 13:11, Lennart Poettering a écrit :

  The second part of my mail that you conveniently removed actually
  explains why that doesn't work: because the SASL auth is inherently
  per-user configuration but in sendmail you can configure it only
  globally for the client side.

 Then replace sendmail with something better.

 http://www.postfix.org/postconf.5.html#smtp_sender_dependent_authentication
 Doesn't this require creating an account on the server for those
 administrative jobs and either turning off authentication when sending
 mail, or storing authentication credentials for each of those mail
 accounts in the postfix config file?

It requires obviously giving postfix the credentials to use with every
different smtp entry point you wish to configure (which is more secure
than having each MUA keep a copy in its own config file)

http://www.postfix.org/SOHO_README.html#client_sasl_sender

 Here, done, time elapsed: 1 min googling.
 Great. But does this really solve anything except refuting the most
 immediate statement by Lennart,

It refutes the given argument

 taken out of context?

Why out of context? Lennart wrote but you can not do xxx with the system
MTA. I pointed out that actually xxx has been possible for quite a long
time. The sendmail sucks therefore Fedora should not ship a system MTA
had been answered before.

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Re: F20 System Wide Change: No Default Sendmail

2013-07-24 Thread Frank Ch. Eigler
Lennart Poettering mzerq...@0pointer.de writes:

 [...]  essentially boils down to I hate change. Which is an OK
 opinion to have, but certainly not four Fedora, where the four Fs
 mean Freedom, Friends, Features, First. The First indicates that
 we should be pioneers, and *not* the guys who never change because
 we are deeply suspicous of any change that is against our
 tradition.  [...]

It's tempting to carry this argument too far.  We can be first with
good new ideas; first with experimental stuff; first with additions.
We need not be first with bad ideas (and discussions here are a way of
figuring out good from bad, let's not beg the question).  We also need
not be first when it comes to subtraction of functionality.

- FChE
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Re: F20 System Wide Change: No Default Sendmail

2013-07-24 Thread Reindl Harald


Am 24.07.2013 13:11, schrieb Lennart Poettering:
 On Mon, 22.07.13 19:33, Reindl Harald (h.rei...@thelounge.net) wrote:
 
 Am 22.07.2013 18:29, schrieb Lennart Poettering:
 If you want to centralize system configuration, rather then services,
 then go ahead and do, that, but actually centralize *the configuration*,
 not the service. In particular, because a centralized client-side SMTP
 service is a really questionnable thing on today's Internet where SMTP
 delivery connections are almost always authenticated by a *user* id

 which could be *easy* solved by ask the users SMTP and credentials
 at the installation, setup /etc/aliases as default forwarding the
 messages to this address and configure SASL authentication
 
 The second part of my mail that you conveniently removed actually
 explains why that doesn't work: because the SASL auth is inherently
 per-user configuration but in sendmail you can configure it only
 globally for the client side.
 
 There is a major mismatch between per-user credentials which you need
 for SMTP SASL and the per-system instance of sendmail

says who?

i doubt that sendmail can not do the same as postfix
if it is so the proposal should be switch to postfix as default MTA

hence i have *infrastructure wide* SASL-sender/relayhost-maps
in a global mysql-database feeded with a simple self developed
php interface and each single sender can be configured to
use a specific realyhost with specific credentials

http://www.postfix.org/postconf.5.html#sender_dependent_relayhost_maps
http://www.postfix.org/postconf.5.html#smtp_sasl_password_maps



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Re: F20 System Wide Change: No Default Sendmail

2013-07-24 Thread Reindl Harald


Am 24.07.2013 15:58, schrieb Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek:
 On Wed, Jul 24, 2013 at 02:11:18PM +0200, Nicolas Mailhot wrote:

 Le Mer 24 juillet 2013 13:11, Lennart Poettering a écrit :

 The second part of my mail that you conveniently removed actually
 explains why that doesn't work: because the SASL auth is inherently
 per-user configuration but in sendmail you can configure it only
 globally for the client side.

 Then replace sendmail with something better.

 http://www.postfix.org/postconf.5.html#smtp_sender_dependent_authentication
 Doesn't this require creating an account on the server

on which server?

on the target server which you relay to you have the account
postfix does only buffer in /var/spool and relay to your
existing account with the credentials

 for those administrative jobs and either turning off authentication 
 when sending mail, or storing authentication credentials for each 
 of those mail accounts in the postfix config file?

/etc/aliases
http://www.postfix.org/ADDRESS_REWRITING_README.html#canonical

it is not that hard to configure it for *most* setups where
one admin exists which sould get all the system mails and
the complexer setups would always need manual interaction

the current proposal is more like we do not ship a useable
sendmail configuration nowaydays and instead to fix this
issue in the installer with a few inputs we remove the MTA



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Re: F20 System Wide Change: No Default Sendmail

2013-07-24 Thread Billy Crook
On Wed, Jul 24, 2013 at 9:10 AM, Frank Ch. Eigler f...@redhat.com wrote:
 It's tempting to carry this argument too far.  We can be first with
 good new ideas; first with experimental stuff; first with additions.
 We need not be first with bad ideas (and discussions here are a way of
 figuring out good from bad, let's not beg the question).  We also need
 not be first when it comes to subtraction of functionality.

This is exactly, what I'm saying.  Please contribute your vote at the meeting.
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Re: F20 System Wide Change: No Default Sendmail

2013-07-24 Thread Kalev Lember
On 07/15/2013 10:36 AM, Jaroslav Reznik wrote:
 = Proposed System Wide Change: No Default Sendmail =
 https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/NoDefaultSendmail
 
 Change owner(s): Lennart Poettering lennart at poettering net, Matthew 
 Miller mattdm at fedoraproject org
 
 No longer install an MTA by default. (Specifically let's remove sendmail from 
 @core and @standard comps groups.)

Good change, thanks for doing this.

I think it makes sense to keep the minimal installation groups truly
minimal. Those who need an MTA can always install it afterwards; and my
server admin friends say that _not_ installing sendmail by default makes
their life easier, because that way they have full control over what
services get installed and enabled.

And with my desktop user hat on, I welcome removal of bloat that I don't
need.

Thanks again!

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Re: F20 System Wide Change: No Default Sendmail

2013-07-24 Thread Matthew Miller
On Wed, Jul 24, 2013 at 01:23:08PM +0200, Lennart Poettering wrote:
 So this issue is still outstanding (but I'll bet you knew that)
 Also as mentioned on this thread, this doesn't work for cron right now
 as cron actually collects all log output of a job and then posts it
 under its own identity, which is why it is attributed to cron/root.
 THis is, if you so will, a misdesign in cronie.

Is there an RFE to fix this?

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Re: F20 System Wide Change: No Default Sendmail

2013-07-24 Thread Matthew Miller
On Wed, Jul 24, 2013 at 02:09:53PM +0200, Marcela Mašláňová wrote:
 Should we change cron to be using syslog by default if this feature gets
 approved?
 Why? If you don't have MTA, it doesn't try to send email. I won't
 plan change anything.

It might be nice for it to be able to do both.

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Re: F20 System Wide Change: No Default Sendmail

2013-07-24 Thread Adam Williamson
On Wed, 2013-07-24 at 11:14 -0500, Billy Crook wrote:
 On Wed, Jul 24, 2013 at 9:10 AM, Frank Ch. Eigler f...@redhat.com wrote:
  It's tempting to carry this argument too far.  We can be first with
  good new ideas; first with experimental stuff; first with additions.
  We need not be first with bad ideas (and discussions here are a way of
  figuring out good from bad, let's not beg the question).  We also need
  not be first when it comes to subtraction of functionality.
 
 This is exactly, what I'm saying.  Please contribute your vote at the meeting.

You seem to be operating under a misconception. FESCo members vote.
No-one else does.
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Re: F20 System Wide Change: No Default Sendmail

2013-07-24 Thread Kevin Fenzi
On Wed, 24 Jul 2013 15:10:05 -0700
Adam Williamson awill...@redhat.com wrote:

 On Wed, 2013-07-24 at 11:14 -0500, Billy Crook wrote:
  On Wed, Jul 24, 2013 at 9:10 AM, Frank Ch. Eigler f...@redhat.com
  wrote:
   It's tempting to carry this argument too far.  We can be first
   with good new ideas; first with experimental stuff; first with
   additions. We need not be first with bad ideas (and discussions
   here are a way of figuring out good from bad, let's not beg the
   question).  We also need not be first when it comes to
   subtraction of functionality.
  
  This is exactly, what I'm saying.  Please contribute your vote at
  the meeting.
 
 You seem to be operating under a misconception. FESCo members vote.
 No-one else does.

To clarify a bit: FESCo members vote, and you vote for FESCo
members. ;) 

kevin


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Re: F20 System Wide Change: No Default Sendmail

2013-07-24 Thread Oron Peled
On Wednesday 24 July 2013 13:23:08 Lennart Poettering wrote:
 On Tue, 23.07.13 04:03, Oron Peled (o...@actcom.co.il) wrote:
  There are two issues however:
   * The log-splitting of journald is really nice feature. But it doesn't
 work for cron:
  $ echo '* * * * * /bin/echo Test output from cron' | \
  
   crontab '-'# than wait a minute
  
  $ journalctl# only shows crontab, not the cron output
  $ su -
  # journalctl# Cron output is properly shown.
 
 Also as mentioned on this thread, this doesn't work for cron right now
 as cron actually collects all log output of a job and then posts it
 under its own identity, which is why it is attributed to cron/root.

Sounds reasonable, but please look at the result of previous tests:
   # journalctl SYSLOG_IDENTIFIER=CROND --output verbose
   Tue 2013-07-23 03:31:01 IDT ...
PRIORITY=6
_UID=0
_MACHINE_ID=...
_HOSTNAME=...
_EXE=/usr/bin/bash
_TRANSPORT=syslog
SYSLOG_FACILITY=9
_SELINUX_CONTEXT=system_u:system_r:crond_t:s0-s0:c0.c1023
_GID=501
_AUDIT_LOGINUID=501
_SYSTEMD_OWNER_UID=501
_BOOT_ID=...
SYSLOG_IDENTIFIER=CROND
_COMM=sh
MESSAGE=(oron) CMD (/bin/echo Test output from cron)
_CMDLINE=/bin/sh -c /bin/echo Test output from cron
SYSLOG_PID=19788
_PID=19788
_AUDIT_SESSION=194
_SYSTEMD_CGROUP=/user/501.user/194.session
_SYSTEMD_SESSION=194
_SOURCE_REALTIME_TIMESTAMP=1374539461144186

It seems it was filtered by _UID, but what's the difference between that
and _AUDIT_LOGINUID and _SYSTEMD_OWNER_UID?

 THis is, if you so will, a misdesign in cronie.

Maybe:
 * But if it writes to syslog as root (_UID=0), how come _AUDIT_LOGINUID
   is my uid?
 * This missdesign cannot exist in the mail interface, since any sane MTA
   delivers local mails as the recipient user.

In any case, this latent bug is triggered by removal of MTA -- so solving
it would drop at least this show-stopper for the suggested feature.

   * Logs are inherently line-oriented (which is very good for their
 intended use case). However, many cron-jobs produce various reports
 which are multi-line in their nature -- not a very good fit.
 
 Cron currently collects all the job's logs in one go and then writes
 them under its own identity in one big transaction out. THis means that
 there's no way to get live access to the logs of current long-running
 jobs. Which is certainly suboptimal.

Hmmm... you are right that for *some* cron-jobs, logging is better fit
than mailing. However, for *others* it's the reverse. The examples
I gave are reports (e.g: think about HTML report -- is there any
sense in div... line without its matching /div?)

There are obviously orders of magnitude of the report case cron-jobs
then the prior -- just due to the fact the default cron-to-mail
existed from early 80's on very wide OS range and the cron-to-log
is relatively new feature that few heard about (I only heard about
it in this thread -- thanks).

The default mentioned in this thread -- mail and fall back to logging
if there's no MTA sound very reasonable design to me. It would be
*nice-to-have* if there was a way to specify cron-to-log per-job
(or even per-crontab) without resorting to | logger..., but
that's for another mail-thread :-)

 Note that due to the context we collect of messages it should be
 preferable these days if logging happens immediately per-line and then
 is recombined at display time, rather than collected and done at the
 end, simply to make sure latencies are low, and you get a live view into
 the system.
 But either way, both philosophies (log individual log lines immediately
 + log them all in one) work fine with journald, we can do
 both, better than syslog ever could.

Obviously, journald manage its log data better than syslogd.

However, we compare *logging* in general against *mail*:
 * Mail is pushed to the user, while the user need to actively read (pull)
   the log. So mail, by definition is a kind of notification-system.

 * Unlike desktop notifications which are normally transient, mail can be
   read offline, sorted by arbitrary user criteria (this mail is
   important *to me* so I put it in that folder), is normally saved
   long-term (and usually backed-up), can be trivially be forwarded
   (automatically/manually), shared between systems etc.

 * Logging shares most previously mentioned mail attributes (as compared
   to desktop notifications) -- i.e: it's persistent, may be backed-up, may
   be routed. However, it's line-oriented and not message oriented.

 * Obviously, messages may be re-constructed from lines, just like messages
   may be constructed from byte-streams -- do you use SOCK_STREAM for
   SOCK_DGRAM use-cases? (let's talk local-sockets, so we don't drift
   to reliability/ordering issues which are not 

Re: F20 System Wide Change: No Default Sendmail

2013-07-24 Thread Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek
On Thu, Jul 25, 2013 at 03:13:33AM +0300, Oron Peled wrote:
 On Wednesday 24 July 2013 13:23:08 Lennart Poettering wrote:
  On Tue, 23.07.13 04:03, Oron Peled (o...@actcom.co.il) wrote:
   There are two issues however:
* The log-splitting of journald is really nice feature. But it doesn't
  work for cron:
   $ echo '* * * * * /bin/echo Test output from cron' | \
   
crontab '-'# than wait a minute
   
   $ journalctl# only shows crontab, not the cron output
   $ su -
   # journalctl# Cron output is properly shown.
  
  Also as mentioned on this thread, this doesn't work for cron right now
  as cron actually collects all log output of a job and then posts it
  under its own identity, which is why it is attributed to cron/root.
 
 Sounds reasonable, but please look at the result of previous tests:
# journalctl SYSLOG_IDENTIFIER=CROND --output verbose
Tue 2013-07-23 03:31:01 IDT ...
 PRIORITY=6
 _UID=0
 _MACHINE_ID=...
 _HOSTNAME=...
 _EXE=/usr/bin/bash
 _TRANSPORT=syslog
 SYSLOG_FACILITY=9
 _SELINUX_CONTEXT=system_u:system_r:crond_t:s0-s0:c0.c1023
 _GID=501
 _AUDIT_LOGINUID=501
 _SYSTEMD_OWNER_UID=501
 _BOOT_ID=...
 SYSLOG_IDENTIFIER=CROND
 _COMM=sh
 MESSAGE=(oron) CMD (/bin/echo Test output from cron)
 _CMDLINE=/bin/sh -c /bin/echo Test output from cron
 SYSLOG_PID=19788
 _PID=19788
 _AUDIT_SESSION=194
 _SYSTEMD_CGROUP=/user/501.user/194.session
 _SYSTEMD_SESSION=194
 _SOURCE_REALTIME_TIMESTAMP=1374539461144186
 
 It seems it was filtered by _UID, but what's the difference between that
 and _AUDIT_LOGINUID and _SYSTEMD_OWNER_UID?
Those fields are described in systemd.journal-fields(7) manpage:
- _UID is the UID of the sender of the messsage
- _AUDIT_LOGINUID comes from the kernel's audit subsystem
- _SYSTEMD_OWNER_UID is derived from the position in systemd cgroup
  hierarchy.
Each one serves a different purpose. The underscore in front signifies that
they were collected by journald itself, and are not controlled by the sender.

 
  THis is, if you so will, a misdesign in cronie.
 
 Maybe:
  * But if it writes to syslog as root (_UID=0), how come _AUDIT_LOGINUID
is my uid?
Cron opens a pam session when running your job, and then login uid
is set.

Zbyszek
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Re: F20 System Wide Change: No Default Sendmail

2013-07-24 Thread dan . mashal
+1
Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

-Original Message-
From: Kevin Fenzi ke...@scrye.com
Sender: devel-boun...@lists.fedoraproject.org
Date: Wed, 24 Jul 2013 16:12:03 
To: devel@lists.fedoraproject.org
Reply-To: Development discussions related to Fedora
devel@lists.fedoraproject.org
Subject: Re: F20 System Wide Change: No Default Sendmail

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Re: F20 System Wide Change: No Default Sendmail

2013-07-23 Thread Marcela Mašláňová

On 07/15/2013 03:45 PM, Sérgio Basto wrote:

On Seg, 2013-07-15 at 10:36 +0200, Jaroslav Reznik wrote:

= Proposed System Wide Change: No Default Sendmail =
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/NoDefaultSendmail

Change owner(s): Lennart Poettering lennart at poettering net, Matthew
Miller mattdm at fedoraproject org

No longer install an MTA by default. (Specifically let's remove sendmail from
@core and @standard comps groups.)

== Detailed description ==
Let's change the default install to no longer install an MTA by default.
Specifically, let's remove sendmail from the @standard and @core group.

On today's Internet most SMTP hosts do not accept mail from a server which is
not configured as a mail exchange for a real domain, hence the default
configuration of sendmail is seldom useful. Even if the server is not tied to a
real mail domain, it can be configured to authenticate as a user on the target
server, but again, this requires explicit configuration on both ends and is
fairly awkward. Something that doesn't work without manual configuration should
not be in the default install.

Most MUAs we ship (especially those we install by default) do not deliver to a
local MTA anyway but rather include an SMTP client. Usually, they will not
pick up mail delivered to local users. This means that unless the user knows
about local mail and takes steps to receive local mail addressed to root, such
messages are likely to be ignored.

On top of that, sendmail has always been a quite surprising choice for an MTA,
as most administrators tend to prefer mail systems such as Postfix or Exim
these days, and Sendmail appears to be quite arcane to most.

Administrators should install the MTA of their choice after installation (or
via kickstart) and sendmail should not be the default anymore.

Many other distributions do not install an MTA by default anymore, and so
should we. Running systems without MTA is already widely tested.

The various tools (such as cron) which previously required a local MTA for
operation have been updated already to deliver their job output to syslog
rather than sendmail, which is a good default.

Also see the previous attempt:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/NoDefaultMTA

== Scope ==
Simply remove sendmail from all default install groups in comps.

Packages which strictly require a MTA to run might need updating to gain
dependencies on server(smtp) (but they needed that before too, so this is
mostly just bugfixing that's useful anyway). If any of the packages in the
default install is one of those, we need to look at it in detail, and find a
solution. However, currently no package of the default install is requiring an
MTA.

Proposal owners: Commit a change to comps to remove sendmail from it.

Other developers: logwatch/logcheck might need updating to not require an MTA
for delivering log changes. Some packages might need a dependency on
server(smtp) added.


I'd like understand how cronjobs deliver his emails , to root user ?



Release engineering: nothing really.

Policies and guidelines: nothing really. Maybe the guidelines should clarify
that /usr/bin/sendmail doesn't exist on many systems, but that was already the
case before -- so little changes.
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As a part of cronie upstream I should probably answer. Cron was patched 
long time ago to log into syslog if mail can't be send. There is also 
option for using syslog by default.


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Re: F20 System Wide Change: No Default Sendmail

2013-07-23 Thread Matthias Clasen
On Mon, 2013-07-22 at 12:25 -0600, Chris Murphy wrote:
 On Jul 22, 2013, at 10:25 AM, Adam Williamson awill...@redhat.com wrote:
  
  
  Even running the latest and greatest rawhide nothing desktop-side
  caught a very basic event like a failing disk!
  
  GNOME Disks is supposed to pop up a notification when SMART reports
  pre-fail status for a disk, I think. I suppose it's possible that's
  broken on the GNOME side somehow.
 
 Difficult to test. ;-)
 
 GNOME Disks will poll for SMART info when it's run manually. As for 
 notifications when the app isn't running, I'm not sure how this would work 
 without a daemon running that polls on a schedule. Same for mdadm created 
 RAID arrays. Neither mdadm or smartd are configured out of the box to issue 
 notifications, and when they are so configured, both depend on email as the 
 mechanism.
 
 I consistently get notifications from Gnome Shell if I use LVM (integrated) 
 RAID, but presently anaconda doesn't create this form of RAID. Instead it 
 uses mdadm to create an explicit md device, then creates LVM on that. Whereas 
 the integrated approach, the raid level is an attribute of the LV (it does 
 use the md driver code, but it doesn't depend on mdadm for creation or 
 monitoring) with its own LVM monitoring daemon.

I spent 5 minutes reconstructing my old knowledge of how this works:

The udisks system service is monitoring SMART info. GNOME disks installs
a gnome-settings-daemon plugin which is what pops up the notifications.

So no, running GNOME Disks should not be required to get such
notifications. Having it installed should be enough.

udisks even has API
http://udisks.freedesktop.org/docs/1.90.0/gdbus-org.freedesktop.UDisks2.Drive.Ata.html#gdbus-method-org-freedesktop-UDisks2-Drive-Ata.SmartUpdate
that lets you test this without taking a hammer to your disk.


Matthias



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Re: F20 System Wide Change: No Default Sendmail

2013-07-23 Thread Olav Vitters
On Mon, Jul 22, 2013 at 03:13:28PM -0500, Billy Crook wrote:
 I would love to see the day systemd is as polished, ubiquitous, and
 robust as smtp.  But until that happens, nobody is helped by removing
 MTA from the default install.  We're not there yet, and theres no

systemd and SMTP are not related. This kind of argument is just stop
energy.

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Re: F20 System Wide Change: No Default Sendmail

2013-07-23 Thread Reindl Harald


Am 22.07.2013 18:29, schrieb Lennart Poettering:
 If you want to centralize system configuration, rather then services,
 then go ahead and do, that, but actually centralize *the configuration*,
 not the service. In particular, because a centralized client-side SMTP
 service is a really questionnable thing on today's Internet where SMTP
 delivery connections are almost always authenticated by a *user* id

which could be *easy* solved by ask the users SMTP and credentials
at the installation, setup /etc/aliases as default forwarding the
messages to this address and configure SASL authentication

with postfix these are a few lines of config and the problem
of the never faced root's inbox would be solved at all





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Re: F20 System Wide Change: No Default Sendmail

2013-07-23 Thread Reindl Harald


Am 22.07.2013 18:51, schrieb Lennart Poettering:
 On Fri, 19.07.13 14:47, Frank Ch. Eigler (f...@redhat.com) wrote:
 
 And it's just not possible to automatically configure e-mail. [...]

 As for outgoing SMTP, DHCP packets can identify servers; so can DNS
 heuristics.
 
 I have yet to see my first DHCP server in the wild that actually supplies 
 that info...

here you have - LAN IP's masked but CP from production - as well as
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Thunderbird:Autoconfiguration
is not that hard to setup and maintain automatically even
for some hundret of domains

subnet 192.168.196.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 {
 option domain-name thelounge.net;
 option domain-name-servers 192.168.196.6, 192.168.196.106, 192.168.196.30;
 option routers 192.168.196.1;
 option smtp-server 192.168.196.30;
 option pop-server 192.168.196.30;
 option ntp-servers 192.168.196.107, 192.168.196.112;
 option time-servers 192.168.196.107, 192.168.196.112;
 option subnet-mask 255.255.255.0;
 option broadcast-address 192.168.196.255;
 option interface-mtu 1472;
 range 192.168.196.234 192.168.196.240;
}



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Re: F20 System Wide Change: No Default Sendmail

2013-07-23 Thread Billy Crook
On Tue, Jul 23, 2013 at 7:32 AM, Olav Vitters o...@vitters.nl wrote:
 On Mon, Jul 22, 2013 at 03:13:28PM -0500, Billy Crook wrote:
 I would love to see the day systemd is as polished, ubiquitous, and
 robust as smtp.  But until that happens, nobody is helped by removing
 MTA from the default install.  We're not there yet, and theres no

 systemd and SMTP are not related. This kind of argument is just stop
 energy.

No.  You are wrong.  When Sendmail is on the chopping block because
let's just send anything that should get mailed, to systemd instead,
and let it pop up pretty graphical bubbles because nobody reads mail
anyways, the two are very much related in the context of this thread.

Clever as it was to frame the attempted deprecation of sendmail and
syslog as separate issues, I think most people can see right through
it.  I know I can.

systemd is great, but it's not a golden hammer, and its existence
doesn't render all other software obsolete.

I remain stunned to see this many people in this forum, so desperate
to get rid of them in the default install -- so eager to follow the
latest fad.

This is not the time to remove sendmail.  This is the time to use it
properly.  This is the time for it to get configured properly during
install.  Frankly after so many years of having to set it up by hand
on Fedora, I'm quite ready to see it in the default installer.  It
should always have been there.  It's absence in the installer is why
certain people perceive sendmail to not be useful.  I use it a good
dozen or so times a day NOT even counting cronjobs and automated
sending.  Having a local MTA on every machine enables deeper
asynchronous workflow on an organizational scale.

Sendmail or otherwise, an MTA BELONGS in Default.
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Re: F20 System Wide Change: No Default Sendmail

2013-07-23 Thread Martin Langhoff
On Tue, Jul 23, 2013 at 10:10 AM, Billy Crook billycr...@gmail.com wrote:
 Sendmail or otherwise, an MTA BELONGS in Default.

There is no consensus on that, at all. Very successful competitors to
Fedora have removed it, and their users are happy.



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Re: F20 System Wide Change: No Default Sendmail

2013-07-23 Thread Matthew Miller
On Mon, Jul 22, 2013 at 07:33:25PM +0200, Reindl Harald wrote:
 which could be *easy* solved by ask the users SMTP and credentials
 at the installation, setup /etc/aliases as default forwarding the
 messages to this address and configure SASL authentication

That really is only useful on a single user system. If there's an effort to
write the code that does this when Fedora is used in this way, I think
that's reasonably interesting.


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Re: F20 System Wide Change: No Default Sendmail

2013-07-23 Thread Matthew Miller
On Tue, Jul 23, 2013 at 09:10:00AM -0500, Billy Crook wrote:
 No.  You are wrong.  When Sendmail is on the chopping block because
 let's just send anything that should get mailed, to systemd instead,
 and let it pop up pretty graphical bubbles because nobody reads mail
 anyways, the two are very much related in the context of this thread.

There is no chopping block, and no proposal to put anything on one if
there were.

 This is not the time to remove sendmail.  This is the time to use it
 properly.  This is the time for it to get configured properly during
 install.  Frankly after so many years of having to set it up by hand

Okay. I'd be interested in seeing an alternate proposal (including people
lined up to do the work). Proposals like
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=143437 (note, from me!) have
been around for years (2004, for that one) but haven't gone anywhere.
Meanwhile, things in the _world_ have gotten worse for this proposal. People
don't read or expect local mail anymore, even on Linux systems. Mail clients
aren't configured to expect it, even when they are local clients rather than
web-based. These things can be solved with some effort, but I don't see
anyone actually working on it. A worse class of problem is that mail from
home broadband providers is likely to just be rejected, and in fact many
networks don't allow unauthenticated outgoing mail at all. That makes the
problem much more complex than it was a decade ago, when any random system
could in fact reasonably be its own mail server.

So, there's some coding to be done to make this alterative proposal work.
Or at the very least, some writing and formalizing of the proposal. That's
good, because it gives an alternative to just being a negative stop doing
things! voice.

Also, though, please be aware that some individual sat down and installed
this system may not always be our main use case. All of these configure it
on install suggestions don't help us with the cloud image at all.

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Re: F20 System Wide Change: No Default Sendmail

2013-07-23 Thread Fulko Hew
On Tue, Jul 23, 2013 at 10:19 AM, Martin Langhoff martin.langh...@gmail.com
 wrote:

 On Tue, Jul 23, 2013 at 10:10 AM, Billy Crook billycr...@gmail.com
 wrote:
  Sendmail or otherwise, an MTA BELONGS in Default.

 There is no consensus on that, at all. Very successful competitors to
 Fedora have removed it, and their users are happy.


Those 'successful competitors' are probably being used in a
limited-requirement mode; like a 'single-user personal workstation'.
In those environments an MTA probably isn't (really) needed because an
MUA is probably all that's used... or all that the human 'thinks' they need.

But, personally, I agree with  billycr...@gmail.com...
On the servers I run, and the server applications I've written,
the use of email is mandatory and the use of an MTA is the
best, most-efficient way to deal with the email.
I say... servers should definitely have a default MTA.

We shouldn't confuse the need/use of an MTA with that of cron, syslog or
journald.
They're purposes do not overlap.
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Re: F20 System Wide Change: No Default Sendmail

2013-07-23 Thread Billy Crook
On Tue, Jul 23, 2013 at 9:56 AM, Matthew Miller
mat...@fedoraproject.org wrote:
 Also, though, please be aware that some individual sat down and installed
 this system may not always be our main use case. All of these configure it
 on install suggestions don't help us with the cloud image at all.

I see no reason at all that it couldn't be configured on install in
the cloud image too.  It'd be handled much the same as timezone, ntp,
dns, gateway, hostname, etc.  As others have shown, it can also be
served via DHCP.
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Re: F20 System Wide Change: No Default Sendmail

2013-07-23 Thread Matthew Miller
On Tue, Jul 23, 2013 at 10:57:15AM -0400, Fulko Hew wrote:
 But, personally, I agree with  billycr...@gmail.com...
 On the servers I run, and the server applications I've written,
 the use of email is mandatory and the use of an MTA is the
 best, most-efficient way to deal with the email.

None of this is in conflict with the proposal to not install sendmail
everywhere.

 I say... servers should definitely have a default MTA.

We've never had any luck defining what a Fedora server looks like. That's
why I think it's better to have servers start from minimal and you can build
up in kickstart. There, you _probably_ want Postfix or Exim instead of
Sendmail, and it's easier if we haven't preselected something.


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Re: F20 System Wide Change: No Default Sendmail

2013-07-23 Thread Matthew Miller
On Tue, Jul 23, 2013 at 10:03:16AM -0500, Billy Crook wrote:
  Also, though, please be aware that some individual sat down and installed
  this system may not always be our main use case. All of these configure it
  on install suggestions don't help us with the cloud image at all.
 I see no reason at all that it couldn't be configured on install in
 the cloud image too.  It'd be handled much the same as timezone, ntp,
 dns, gateway, hostname, etc.  As others have shown, it can also be
 served via DHCP.

Since it _isn't_ served via DHCP in any environment I'm aware of, that's not
actually useful.

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Re: F20 System Wide Change: No Default Sendmail

2013-07-23 Thread Olav Vitters
On Tue, Jul 23, 2013 at 10:57:15AM -0400, Fulko Hew wrote:
 But, personally, I agree with  billycr...@gmail.com...
 On the servers I run, and the server applications I've written,
 the use of email is mandatory and the use of an MTA is the
 best, most-efficient way to deal with the email.
 I say... servers should definitely have a default MTA.

IMO email is terribly crappy way of informing. You get way too many
emails. In any case, as soon as you have more than a few servers, you'll
have some configuration management thing to set things up, e.g. Puppet
or anything similar. I dislike sendmail, prefer Postfix. All of that is
automatic.

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Re: F20 System Wide Change: No Default Sendmail

2013-07-23 Thread Billy Crook
On Tue, Jul 23, 2013 at 10:06 AM, Matthew Miller
mat...@fedoraproject.org wrote:
 Since it _isn't_ served via DHCP in any environment I'm aware of, that's not
 actually useful.

Nice to meet you Matt.  As of this morning, it is served via DHCP in
mine.  There's also that guy earlier in the thread.  So now you know
of two.  Perhaps that dhcp option ought to be in the packaged
dhcpd.conf template.

On Tue, Jul 23, 2013 at 10:09 AM, Olav Vitters o...@vitters.nl wrote:
 IMO email is terribly crappy way of informing. You get way too many
 emails.

And yet everyone continues to use it.  I bet there's a good reason...

 In any case, as soon as you have more than a few servers, you'll
 have some configuration management thing to set things up, e.g. Puppet
 or anything similar.

Yes, and it doesn't displace an MTA.

 I dislike sendmail, prefer Postfix. All of that is
 automatic.

I'm much more open to changing the default MTA from sendmail to
something else than just getting rid of the MTA.  I do happen to find
sendmail config particularly sadistic.  I'm sure there are other areas
where more modern MTAs outdo sendmail as well.  dnl:wq
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Re: F20 System Wide Change: No Default Sendmail

2013-07-23 Thread Reindl Harald


Am 23.07.2013 16:37, schrieb Matthew Miller:
 On Mon, Jul 22, 2013 at 07:33:25PM +0200, Reindl Harald wrote:
 which could be *easy* solved by ask the users SMTP and credentials
 at the installation, setup /etc/aliases as default forwarding the
 messages to this address and configure SASL authentication
 
 That really is only useful on a single user system

and most systems are and they which are not have usually
one person who calls himself and/or is called admin and
this is the right address for root-cron



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Re: F20 System Wide Change: No Default Sendmail

2013-07-23 Thread Matthew Miller
On Tue, Jul 23, 2013 at 10:18:47AM -0500, Billy Crook wrote:
  Since it _isn't_ served via DHCP in any environment I'm aware of, that's not
  actually useful.
 Nice to meet you Matt.  As of this morning, it is served via DHCP in
 mine.  There's also that guy earlier in the thread.  So now you know
 of two.  Perhaps that dhcp option ought to be in the packaged
 dhcpd.conf template.

You've totally removed the context here. Which cloud environment do you run?


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Re: F20 System Wide Change: No Default Sendmail

2013-07-23 Thread Nicolas Mailhot

Le Mar 23 juillet 2013 17:05, Matthew Miller a écrit :

 I say... servers should definitely have a default MTA.

 We've never had any luck defining what a Fedora server looks like. That's
 why I think it's better to have servers start from minimal and you can
 build
 up in kickstart. There, you _probably_ want Postfix or Exim instead of
 Sendmail, and it's easier if we haven't preselected something.

Look, the proposal is not calling to replace sendmail, it's calling to
remove any MTA. So sendmail is a bad MTA is not a good argument for this
proposal. sendmail is a bad MTA is an argument to install Postfix or
Exim by default, not to remove the default MTA. And it's way easier to
replace the MTA in a distro built around an MTA that to add an MTA on a
distro where people stopped caring about MTA compatibility since it became
an optional component

Though anyway, +1 to use postfix by default like Suse

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Re: F20 System Wide Change: No Default Sendmail

2013-07-23 Thread Billy Crook
On Tue, Jul 23, 2013 at 10:51 AM, Matthew Miller
mat...@fedoraproject.org wrote:
 On Tue, Jul 23, 2013 at 10:18:47AM -0500, Billy Crook wrote:
  Since it _isn't_ served via DHCP in any environment I'm aware of, that's 
  not
  actually useful.
 Nice to meet you Matt.  As of this morning, it is served via DHCP in
 mine.  There's also that guy earlier in the thread.  So now you know
 of two.  Perhaps that dhcp option ought to be in the packaged
 dhcpd.conf template.

 You've totally removed the context here. Which cloud environment do you run?

Actually I'm afraid your cloud environment example is just as far out
of context.  I can't imagine many cloud deployments that don't use
kickstarts and have their own individually chosen packageset tuned for
exactly their business case.  They can use core / minimal +  whatever
specific individual packages they need.  I hardly think a cloud
environment is going to base their production on the Default package
set.

Default should include what people 'generally expect of a GNU+Linux
system' -- and that includes an MTA.  It should include a syslog, and
it should include screen too for that matter.

I mentioned DHCP only to demonstrate the fact that you were dismissing
the existence of real environments in which smtp-server is served via
DHCP, _today_.

We should be working towards deterministic, automatic, easy configuration.


On Tue, Jul 23, 2013 at 11:21 AM, Nicolas Mailhot
nicolas.mail...@laposte.net wrote:
 Look, the proposal is not calling to replace sendmail, it's calling to
 remove any MTA. So sendmail is a bad MTA is not a good argument for this
 proposal. sendmail is a bad MTA is an argument to install Postfix or
 Exim by default, not to remove the default MTA.

I couldn't have said it better.  Most people get it.  If you don't
like ${President}, vote for a better one.  Don't bulldoze the
whitehouse.
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Re: F20 System Wide Change: No Default Sendmail

2013-07-23 Thread Matthew Miller
On Tue, Jul 23, 2013 at 06:21:45PM +0200, Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
 Look, the proposal is not calling to replace sendmail, it's calling to
 remove any MTA. So sendmail is a bad MTA is not a good argument for this

No, it's *really* not calling to remove any MTA. It's calling for no MTA
to be installed by default, or at least not in the minimal install.

The two arguments against this change I hear are:

 * This is a slipperly slope to the doom of all MTAs. This argument isn't very
   convincing -- otherwise non-sendmail MTAs would already be dead, as would
   every other server we don't install by default.

 * An MTA should be part of the base design. This point I'm open to,
   although I think it requires more work than people are willing to
   actually do, and I'd like to see a counter-proposal involving actually
   doing that work.

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Re: F20 System Wide Change: No Default Sendmail

2013-07-23 Thread Chris Adams
Once upon a time, Matthew Miller mat...@fedoraproject.org said:
 On Tue, Jul 23, 2013 at 06:21:45PM +0200, Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
  Look, the proposal is not calling to replace sendmail, it's calling to
  remove any MTA. So sendmail is a bad MTA is not a good argument for this
 
 No, it's *really* not calling to remove any MTA. It's calling for no MTA
 to be installed by default, or at least not in the minimal install.
 
 The two arguments against this change I hear are:
 
  * This is a slipperly slope to the doom of all MTAs. This argument isn't 
 very
convincing -- otherwise non-sendmail MTAs would already be dead, as would
every other server we don't install by default.
 
  * An MTA should be part of the base design. This point I'm open to,
although I think it requires more work than people are willing to
actually do, and I'd like to see a counter-proposal involving actually
doing that work.

I run lots of servers with MTAs, and sendmail in particular (you mean
everybody can't parse and understand lines like this:

R$*+$*@$*   $: $1+$2@$3 $| $D $3 ? !Spam 

without Google? :) ).  I have no problem with no-default-MTA.  An MTA
only works in most cases with additional configuration, and that
configuration will vary widely between setups and MTAs.

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Re: F20 System Wide Change: No Default Sendmail

2013-07-23 Thread Adam Williamson
On Tue, 2013-07-23 at 11:52 -0500, Billy Crook wrote:
 On Tue, Jul 23, 2013 at 10:51 AM, Matthew Miller
 mat...@fedoraproject.org wrote:
  On Tue, Jul 23, 2013 at 10:18:47AM -0500, Billy Crook wrote:
   Since it _isn't_ served via DHCP in any environment I'm aware of, that's 
   not
   actually useful.
  Nice to meet you Matt.  As of this morning, it is served via DHCP in
  mine.  There's also that guy earlier in the thread.  So now you know
  of two.  Perhaps that dhcp option ought to be in the packaged
  dhcpd.conf template.
 
  You've totally removed the context here. Which cloud environment do you run?
 
 Actually I'm afraid your cloud environment example is just as far out
 of context.  I can't imagine many cloud deployments that don't use
 kickstarts and have their own individually chosen packageset tuned for
 exactly their business case.  They can use core / minimal +  whatever
 specific individual packages they need.  I hardly think a cloud
 environment is going to base their production on the Default package
 set.

sendmail is in @core.
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Re: F20 System Wide Change: No Default Sendmail

2013-07-22 Thread Miloslav Trmač
On Sun, Jul 21, 2013 at 9:20 PM, Matthew Miller mat...@mattdm.org wrote:
 On Sun, Jul 21, 2013 at 04:09:32PM +0200, Reindl Harald wrote:
 the problem i see is when things like MTA and rsyslog are
 removed from the defualt install many pakcgers will less
 care about them in the future nor test how well it works

 That's a separate issue. MTAs and syslog are going to be needed for many
 very important use cases for years to come. That doesn't mean we need to
 install them by default.

It's not really separate.

We don't have any canonical developer documentation that says what is
or isn't a part of the OS, and good Linux applications are expected
to use; we only have traditions, word of mouth, and de-facto
standards. In this situation, what is or isn't enabled by default and
shipped by default matters more than saying are going to be needed
for years to come - the actions speak louder than the words.

Think of these debates as attempts to, after all the years, agree on
and write down what the traditions and de-facto standards actually
are.
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Re: F20 System Wide Change: No Default Sendmail

2013-07-22 Thread Reindl Harald

Am 21.07.2013 21:20, schrieb Matthew Miller:
 On Sun, Jul 21, 2013 at 04:09:32PM +0200, Reindl Harald wrote:
 the problem i see is when things like MTA and rsyslog are
 removed from the defualt install many pakcgers will less
 care about them in the future nor test how well it works
 
 That's a separate issue. MTAs and syslog are going to be needed for many
 very important use cases for years to come

but it is how things are started

first the are not handeled with care at all
second nobody can rely on that they are there
third they get declared as obsoloete from people which not understand their 
usefullnes
fourth they are not supported by new applications because they are not always 
there



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Re: F20 System Wide Change: No Default Sendmail

2013-07-22 Thread Adam Williamson
On Sun, 2013-07-21 at 18:55 +0200, Nicolas Mailhot wrote:

 Where is the desktop notification solution in Fedora? There is none able
 to even remotely approach the capabilities of the cron + MTA bits you so
 dislike. 

You're ascribing emotions to a proposal where none exist. No-one said
they 'so dislike' cron + MTA, what they said was that they believe few
Fedora installations use local mail delivery any more and it increases
the size of the minimal and default install unnecessarily, so they'd
like to take it out of the minimal and default package sets. It's not
about 'liking' or 'disliking' it.

 Even running the latest and greatest rawhide nothing desktop-side
 caught a very basic event like a failing disk!

GNOME Disks is supposed to pop up a notification when SMART reports
pre-fail status for a disk, I think. I suppose it's possible that's
broken on the GNOME side somehow.

  The only state-of-the-art
 part of our notification chain is the smtpd element, everything else is
 hacks or unfinished prototypes (state-of-the-art as in, what are Google
 and Amazon using to notify their users of events? Mail messages! They
 would be ROFL if they were reading this conversation. If it's not done yet
 I predict they'll integrate their phones and tablets and notify you of
 problems by mail in the next years.)

Again you're confusing the issue. The Change proposed here is not 'email
is so old LOL LOL noone's allowed to use it any more!' It's 'we don't
need an MTA in the minimal and default Fedora package sets'. You are
attacking a straw man.
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Re: F20 System Wide Change: No Default Sendmail

2013-07-22 Thread Lennart Poettering
On Fri, 19.07.13 19:37, Miloslav Trmač (m...@volny.cz) wrote:

 However, having the /usr/sbin/sendmail API available to applications
 is valuable - it brings a significant system administration benefit of
 centralizing the SMTP configuration.

Sure it is valuable. However, it's also a pretty bad API, since it
currently will accept all messages but in most cases silently eat them
up and devlier to a mailbox that constantly grows and is never
checked. APIs that claim to work but actually don't, and where there's
*no* way to figure that out are just inhrently broken. 

In general, we should work on centralizing things more, we certainly
agree on that. However, I find it really surprising to draw the line
here between logs generated by cron jobs (and similar cases) where
traditionally mails were sent, and the rest were traditionally logfiles
were written. That makes very little sense...

If you want to centralize system configuration, rather then services,
then go ahead and do, that, but actually centralize *the configuration*,
not the service. In particular, because a centralized client-side SMTP
service is a really questionnable thing on today's Internet where SMTP
delivery connections are almost always authenticated by a *user* id. Due
to that they are generally much better configured in the MUA which
actually run in the user context instead of a system service which lacks
all that and where no infrastructure exists for supplying user
authentication information.

Lennart

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Re: F20 System Wide Change: No Default Sendmail

2013-07-22 Thread Lennart Poettering
On Fri, 19.07.13 13:17, Billy Crook (billycr...@gmail.com) wrote:

 Sendmail stays in Default unless there is compelling reason to switch to
 postfix, exim, meta1, etc.  Those users who wish to remove it are welcome
 to do so.  Nobody is stopping them. The default configuration of sendmail
 poses no problem to users who are unaware of it.

Not true. I eats my cron logs and other stuff and I have no way to get
the stuff out of it again with the core install...

 Please voice yourself at meetings in #fedora-devel if this is important to
 you.

Yes, please, post a lot of +1 messages. They contribute so positively
(I mean, literally!) to any discussion. +1 messages are really good
for making a point as they contain so much additional arguments nobody
has heard or read before. It's almost as constructive posting +1s, as
it is posting sarcastic comments about their pointlessness...

Lennart

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Re: F20 System Wide Change: No Default Sendmail

2013-07-22 Thread Lennart Poettering
On Fri, 19.07.13 20:22, Miloslav Trmač (m...@volny.cz) wrote:

 On Fri, Jul 19, 2013 at 8:16 PM, Matthew Miller
 mat...@fedoraproject.org wrote:
  On Fri, Jul 19, 2013 at 07:37:35PM +0200, Miloslav Trmač wrote:
  However, having the /usr/sbin/sendmail API available to applications
  is valuable - it brings a significant system administration benefit of
  centralizing the SMTP configuration.
 
  What does it mean to have available?
 Just that.  The binary exists and does what it is expected to do.

Where expected to do means effectively route it to /dev/null?

  As discussed earlier, I think it's
  significantly better for applications to get errors (which they can handle)
  than to think they've sent a message which really gets buried forever.
 
 In the case I'm thinking about, application installation instructions
 just say make sure $sendmail works instead of configure SMTP (and
 TLS! and SMTP auth!) in this application-specific configuration file.

If features only work after configuration (in articular non-trivial
configuration like this case) then it should not be part of the default
install. Because it is code, that claims to just work, but doesn't. That
is ver hard on the users, and simply is broken.

  I think the way forward is to encourage applications to _log_ rather than to
  send e-mail, via this or any other API.
 Application that want to log shoud log.  Applications that want to
 send e-mail should send e-mail.  My bank's monthly statement would be
 rather useless in the bank's splunk archive.

Sure, but your bank web site probably doesn't send its mails out with
only tools of the default install? They do with a heavily configured
installation of some OS, where they manually configured an SMTP server
and such. Only if they did this is it becomes useful. 

Let's not forget: this is not about removing software from the
distro. This is just about removing it from the default install, since
the current way it is set up by default it just eats up messages
silently, with not indication of error and no useful tools installed to
actually get the messages out of it again.

Despite that I am pretty sure that most of the stuff we currently mail
(like the log output of cron jobs) simply makes no sense as mail, and
should much rather be treated exactly like all other log output. There's
nothing special really about cron that would make it so much better
suitable for sending out its logs per mail, rather then just log them.

Lennart

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Re: F20 System Wide Change: No Default Sendmail

2013-07-22 Thread Lennart Poettering
On Fri, 19.07.13 14:47, Frank Ch. Eigler (f...@redhat.com) wrote:

  And it's just not possible to automatically configure e-mail. [...]
 
 As for outgoing SMTP, DHCP packets can identify servers; so can DNS
 heuristics.

I have yet to see my first DHCP server in the wild that actually supplies that 
info...

Lennart

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Re: F20 System Wide Change: No Default Sendmail

2013-07-22 Thread Miloslav Trmač
On Mon, Jul 22, 2013 at 6:36 PM, Lennart Poettering
mzerq...@0pointer.de wrote:
 On Fri, 19.07.13 20:22, Miloslav Trmač (m...@volny.cz) wrote:

 On Fri, Jul 19, 2013 at 8:16 PM, Matthew Miller
 mat...@fedoraproject.org wrote:
  On Fri, Jul 19, 2013 at 07:37:35PM +0200, Miloslav Trmač wrote:
  However, having the /usr/sbin/sendmail API available to applications
  is valuable - it brings a significant system administration benefit of
  centralizing the SMTP configuration.
 
  What does it mean to have available?
 Just that.  The binary exists and does what it is expected to do.

 Where expected to do means effectively route it to /dev/null?

It's actually less similar to /dev/null than log files are - log files
are rotated and deleted, mail stays in the mail boxes until explicitly
deleted (or space runs out).


  As discussed earlier, I think it's
  significantly better for applications to get errors (which they can handle)
  than to think they've sent a message which really gets buried forever.

 In the case I'm thinking about, application installation instructions
 just say make sure $sendmail works instead of configure SMTP (and
 TLS! and SMTP auth!) in this application-specific configuration file.

 If features only work after configuration (in articular non-trivial
 configuration like this case) then it should not be part of the default
 install.

That a feature needs configuration does not automatically exclude it
from the default installation - removing a package from the default
installation and telling users to install it back is just window
dressing and asking them to do unnecessary extra work.


  I think the way forward is to encourage applications to _log_ rather than 
  to
  send e-mail, via this or any other API.
 Application that want to log shoud log.  Applications that want to
 send e-mail should send e-mail.  My bank's monthly statement would be
 rather useless in the bank's splunk archive.

 Sure, but your bank web site probably doesn't send its mails out with
 only tools of the default install?

What is in the default install is, as argued elsewhere, also an
implicit documentation of how things are done.
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Re: F20 System Wide Change: No Default Sendmail

2013-07-22 Thread Nicolas Mailhot

Le Lun 22 juillet 2013 18:36, Lennart Poettering a écrit :
  There's
 nothing special really about cron that would make it so much better
 suitable for sending out its logs per mail, rather then just log them.

What makes cron and smtpd work well together is that they both perform
async background computing. And many cron messages are not logs they're
notifications of an event the cron is polling for, or submission of job
results.

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Re: F20 System Wide Change: No Default Sendmail

2013-07-22 Thread Nicolas Mailhot

Le Lun 22 juillet 2013 18:29, Lennart Poettering a écrit :

 If you want to centralize system configuration, rather then services,
 then go ahead and do, that, but actually centralize *the configuration*,
 not the service. In particular, because a centralized client-side SMTP
 service is a really questionnable thing on today's Internet where SMTP
 delivery connections are almost always authenticated by a *user* id. Due
 to that they are generally much better configured in the MUA which
 actually run in the user context instead of a system service which lacks
 all that and where no infrastructure exists for supplying user
 authentication information.

Actually, with the various Fedora MUAs I've used, it ended up being easier
to configure them to use local MTA as relay than to try to convince them
individually to do anything more complex than 'non-encrypted smtp without
auth' (when the options existed they changed every few MUA versions and I
got tired of re-parametring them all the time). Bonus point is that
changing the relay options fixes all MUAs in one go, I got free logging of
the MUA activity, and a send queue that does not depend on running the MUA
when the network comes back.

To be sure, it would be cleaner it the connexion user when relaying
depended on the system user that emitted the message. I've not checked if
it was possible or easy to do it.

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Re: F20 System Wide Change: No Default Sendmail

2013-07-22 Thread Miloslav Trmač
On Mon, Jul 22, 2013 at 7:00 PM, Lennart Poettering
mzerq...@0pointer.de wrote:
 On Mon, 22.07.13 18:43, Miloslav Trmač (m...@volny.cz) wrote:

 On Mon, Jul 22, 2013 at 6:36 PM, Lennart Poettering
 mzerq...@0pointer.de wrote:
  Application that want to log shoud log.  Applications that want to
  send e-mail should send e-mail.  My bank's monthly statement would be
  rather useless in the bank's splunk archive.
 
  Sure, but your bank web site probably doesn't send its mails out with
  only tools of the default install?

 What is in the default install is, as argued elsewhere, also an
 implicit documentation of how things are done.

 But it is totally bogus to claim that banks would suddenly stop sending
 you notifcations by email just because Fedora doesn't install sendmail
 by default. I mean, come on, you are not trying to be honest here, and
 you know it.

Sure, if you twist my words into saying something I didn't say...  I
mean, come on, you are not trying to be honest here, and you know it.

The question is _how_ to send the e-mail, not _whether_.
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Re: F20 System Wide Change: No Default Sendmail

2013-07-22 Thread Lennart Poettering
On Mon, 22.07.13 18:43, Miloslav Trmač (m...@volny.cz) wrote:

 On Mon, Jul 22, 2013 at 6:36 PM, Lennart Poettering
 mzerq...@0pointer.de wrote:
  On Fri, 19.07.13 20:22, Miloslav Trmač (m...@volny.cz) wrote:
 
  On Fri, Jul 19, 2013 at 8:16 PM, Matthew Miller
  mat...@fedoraproject.org wrote:
   On Fri, Jul 19, 2013 at 07:37:35PM +0200, Miloslav Trmač wrote:
   However, having the /usr/sbin/sendmail API available to applications
   is valuable - it brings a significant system administration benefit of
   centralizing the SMTP configuration.
  
   What does it mean to have available?
  Just that.  The binary exists and does what it is expected to do.
 
  Where expected to do means effectively route it to /dev/null?
 
 It's actually less similar to /dev/null than log files are - log files
 are rotated and deleted, mail stays in the mail boxes until explicitly
 deleted (or space runs out).

Well, so it's even a DoS... Just find some trigger to generate a lot of
mails to root and /var will eventually fill up, even beyond those 10%
reserved for root, since well, mail to root is accounted to root...

This is not helping your case. It just makes it worse.

  If features only work after configuration (in articular non-trivial
  configuration like this case) then it should not be part of the default
  install.
 
 That a feature needs configuration does not automatically exclude it
 from the default installation - removing a package from the default
 installation and telling users to install it back is just window
 dressing and asking them to do unnecessary extra work.

No, because only a smaller fraction of installs would actually end up
installing a local MTA.

  Application that want to log shoud log.  Applications that want to
  send e-mail should send e-mail.  My bank's monthly statement would be
  rather useless in the bank's splunk archive.
 
  Sure, but your bank web site probably doesn't send its mails out with
  only tools of the default install?
 
 What is in the default install is, as argued elsewhere, also an
 implicit documentation of how things are done.

But it is totally bogus to claim that banks would suddenly stop sending
you notifcations by email just because Fedora doesn't install sendmail
by default. I mean, come on, you are not trying to be honest here, and
you know it.

Lennart

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Re: F20 System Wide Change: No Default Sendmail

2013-07-22 Thread Lennart Poettering
On Sat, 20.07.13 09:00, Robert Nichols (rnicholsnos...@comcast.net) wrote:

 On 07/15/2013 09:14 AM, Lennart Poettering wrote:
 This feature is about not doign local mail delivery by default, by not
 installing any MTA. Instead you find the log output of cronjobs at the
 same place as you find any other log output, the journal/syslog, for
 example accessible via:
 
 journalctl -u crond
 
 or
 
 systemctl status crond
 
 (the latter will only show you 10 log lines by default, the former all
 of them. You can pass -n 100 to either to see the 100 latest ones)
 
 You are thinking only about error output from cron jobs.  Regular
 output from cron jobs can be quite voluminous. Is it reasonable to send
 15 to 20 Kilobytes to the journal (root's logwatch job currently sends
 that much every day)? How about a couple of JPGs (graphs of resource
 usage)?

The journal supports 2^64 sized binary objects to be stored in it. It
currently will get a bit slow if you actually send a lot of data sind it
first needs to XZ compress the blobs before writing them to disk and
that will stall operation for that time, but a few 100K (or even MB) in
a single message should be no problem.

(Note that the way cron's mail support works you cannot use it directly
to send JPEGs...)

Lennart

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Re: F20 System Wide Change: No Default Sendmail

2013-07-22 Thread Alexey I. Froloff
On Mon, Jul 22, 2013 at 06:36:41PM +0200, Lennart Poettering wrote:
 Let's not forget: this is not about removing software from the
 distro. This is just about removing it from the default install, since
 the current way it is set up by default it just eats up messages
 silently, with not indication of error and no useful tools installed to
 actually get the messages out of it again.
Instead of having MTA, I'd rather have tool that can collect and
show such mails.  There are machines (like my and wife's
laptops) that are not supposed to send emails.  They doesn't even
have MUA installed.  All these emails are wasted and not being
rotated.

In 2013 you can't just start sending mails around with default
MTA settings, so not installing and MTA by default is a good
solution.

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Re: F20 System Wide Change: No Default Sendmail

2013-07-22 Thread Miloslav Trmač
On Mon, Jul 22, 2013 at 7:00 PM, Lennart Poettering
mzerq...@0pointer.de wrote:
 On Mon, 22.07.13 18:43, Miloslav Trmač (m...@volny.cz) wrote:

 On Mon, Jul 22, 2013 at 6:36 PM, Lennart Poettering
 mzerq...@0pointer.de wrote:
  On Fri, 19.07.13 20:22, Miloslav Trmač (m...@volny.cz) wrote:
 
  On Fri, Jul 19, 2013 at 8:16 PM, Matthew Miller
  mat...@fedoraproject.org wrote:
  Where expected to do means effectively route it to /dev/null?

 It's actually less similar to /dev/null than log files are - log files
 are rotated and deleted, mail stays in the mail boxes until explicitly
 deleted (or space runs out).

 Well, so it's even a DoS... Just find some trigger to generate a lot of
 mails to root and /var will eventually fill up, even beyond those 10%
 reserved for root, since well, mail to root is accounted to root...

My concern about this proposal doesn't actually depend on local
delivery, it _could_ go to /dev/null by default for all I care.

I'll note, however, that this is a DoS is rarely a convincing
argument - the only practical way to combat a DoS is to impose some
kind of limit, which is just a DoS of a different kind.  You get to
choose _what_ kinds of DoS your computer will be subject to, but with
finite CPU power and storage you can't avoid DoS situations.

And, philosophically, silently losing data is generally much worse
than requiring manual intervention for the system to run when space
runs out.  (Not that the mails we sent by default are _that_ valuable,
though.)
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Re: F20 System Wide Change: No Default Sendmail

2013-07-22 Thread Alexey I. Froloff
On Mon, Jul 22, 2013 at 06:50:17PM +0200, Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
 Actually, with the various Fedora MUAs I've used, it ended up being easier
 to configure them to use local MTA as relay
If you are able to configure the MTA of your choice, then you
will be able to install that MTA when you need it.  Default
settings are not usable for anything other than local delivery.

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Re: F20 System Wide Change: No Default Sendmail

2013-07-22 Thread Matthew Miller
On Mon, Jul 22, 2013 at 06:53:24PM +0200, Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
 What makes cron and smtpd work well together is that they both perform
 async background computing. And many cron messages are not logs they're
 notifications of an event the cron is polling for, or submission of job
 results.

Honest, non-loaded question here. Do you really find them default cron
output mode helpful? You suggested earlier that I dislike cron's e-mail
output, and while I hadn't brought up likes or dislikes before, I really
don't find it so great. To me, it just fills up my mailbox with:

   Jul 02 Cron DaemonCron root@hpc ionice -c3 run-parts /etc/cro
   Jul 02 AnacronAnacron job 'cron.daily' on bigcomputer.home.
   Jul 02 Cron DaemonCron root@hpc ionice -c3 run-parts /etc/cro
   Jul 02 Cron DaemonCron root@wumpus ionice -c3 run-parts /etc/
   Jul 02 Cron DaemonCron root@hpc ionice -c3 run-parts /etc/cro
   Jul 02 Cron DaemonCron root@hpc ionice -c3 run-parts /etc/cro
   Jul 02 Cron DaemonCron root@hpc ionice -c3 run-parts /etc/cro
   Jul 02 Cron DaemonCron root@resonance /opt/seas/sbin/sync-NIS
   Jul 02 Cron DaemonCron root@hpc ionice -c3 run-parts /etc/cro
   Jul 02 Cron DaemonCron root@hpc ionice -c3 run-parts /etc/cro
   Jul 02 Cron DaemonCron root@hpc ionice -c3 run-parts /etc/cro
   Jul 02 Cron DaemonCron masher@releng03 TMPDIR=`mktemp -d /tmp
   Jul 02 Cron DaemonCron root@hpc ionice -c3 run-parts /etc/cro
   Jul 02 Cron DaemonCron root@hpc ionice -c3 run-parts /etc/cro
   Jul 02 Cron DaemonCron root@hpc ionice -c3 run-parts /etc/cro
   Jul 02 Cron DaemonCron root@hpc ionice -c3 run-parts /etc/cro
   Jul 02 Cron DaemonCron root@hpc ionice -c3 run-parts /etc/cro
   Jul 02 Cron DaemonCron root@hpc /etc/15m.local
   Jul 02 Cron DaemonCron root@hpc /etc/15m.local
   Jul 02 Cron DaemonCron root@hpc /etc/15m.local
   Jul 02 Cron DaemonCron root@hpc /etc/15m.local
   Jul 02 Cron DaemonCron root@hpc ionice -c3 run-parts /etc/cro

If I did want e-mail output -- which I used to, before I had proper alerting
set up, so as I mentioned before I totally recognize that use case -- I
really would like it with a meaningful subject line, which means even when
running out of cron, the jobs should actually call sendmail or /usr/bin/mail
directly with pretty-formatted output. (And thus, have an explicit
dependency on an MTA, and also basically have the expectation that they're
running on a system which will be properly configured for its environment,
however that happens.)

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Re: F20 System Wide Change: No Default Sendmail

2013-07-22 Thread Alexander Boström
mån 2013-07-22 klockan 18:36 +0200 skrev Lennart Poettering:

 Despite that I am pretty sure that most of the stuff we currently mail
 (like the log output of cron jobs) simply makes no sense as mail, and
 should much rather be treated exactly like all other log output. There's
 nothing special really about cron that would make it so much better
 suitable for sending out its logs per mail, rather then just log them.

Yeah, as a sysadmin I'm mostly annoyed by services that send mail and
expect someone to have time to read them. Give me a current status that
can be monitored as appropriate (desktop notifications, Nagios etc) and
logs so I can go back and see what went wrong.

Also, I think people who are new to this stuff are much more likely to
look for logs than for mail (what, computers can have mail on them?)
when they're trying to figure out what's happening.

It is however a bit scary if the behavior of cron changes when someone
installs an MTA. I think -s should be the default, but MAILTO= should
have precedence over -s.

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Re: F20 System Wide Change: No Default Sendmail

2013-07-22 Thread Adam Williamson
On Mon, 2013-07-22 at 19:09 +0200, Miloslav Trmač wrote:
 On Mon, Jul 22, 2013 at 7:00 PM, Lennart Poettering
 mzerq...@0pointer.de wrote:
  On Mon, 22.07.13 18:43, Miloslav Trmač (m...@volny.cz) wrote:
 
  On Mon, Jul 22, 2013 at 6:36 PM, Lennart Poettering
  mzerq...@0pointer.de wrote:
   Application that want to log shoud log.  Applications that want to
   send e-mail should send e-mail.  My bank's monthly statement would be
   rather useless in the bank's splunk archive.
  
   Sure, but your bank web site probably doesn't send its mails out with
   only tools of the default install?
 
  What is in the default install is, as argued elsewhere, also an
  implicit documentation of how things are done.
 
  But it is totally bogus to claim that banks would suddenly stop sending
  you notifcations by email just because Fedora doesn't install sendmail
  by default. I mean, come on, you are not trying to be honest here, and
  you know it.
 
 Sure, if you twist my words into saying something I didn't say...  I
 mean, come on, you are not trying to be honest here, and you know it.
 
 The question is _how_ to send the e-mail, not _whether_.

Just before this one gets any worse: it was Nicolas Mailhot who started
talking about banks sending email for some reason, not Miloslav.
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Re: F20 System Wide Change: No Default Sendmail

2013-07-22 Thread Chris Murphy

On Jul 22, 2013, at 10:25 AM, Adam Williamson awill...@redhat.com wrote:
 
 
 Even running the latest and greatest rawhide nothing desktop-side
 caught a very basic event like a failing disk!
 
 GNOME Disks is supposed to pop up a notification when SMART reports
 pre-fail status for a disk, I think. I suppose it's possible that's
 broken on the GNOME side somehow.

Difficult to test. ;-)

GNOME Disks will poll for SMART info when it's run manually. As for 
notifications when the app isn't running, I'm not sure how this would work 
without a daemon running that polls on a schedule. Same for mdadm created RAID 
arrays. Neither mdadm or smartd are configured out of the box to issue 
notifications, and when they are so configured, both depend on email as the 
mechanism.

I consistently get notifications from Gnome Shell if I use LVM (integrated) 
RAID, but presently anaconda doesn't create this form of RAID. Instead it uses 
mdadm to create an explicit md device, then creates LVM on that. Whereas the 
integrated approach, the raid level is an attribute of the LV (it does use the 
md driver code, but it doesn't depend on mdadm for creation or monitoring) with 
its own LVM monitoring daemon.

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Re: F20 System Wide Change: No Default Sendmail

2013-07-22 Thread Lennart Poettering
On Sat, 20.07.13 18:05, Lars E. Pettersson (l...@homer.se) wrote:

 On 07/15/2013 07:54 PM, Lennart Poettering wrote:
 Well, we don't even install any MUA by default currently that would read
 local mail spools.  Effectively, this means that currently the log output
 of cronjobs is more or less lost.
 
 A user normally installs a MUA of their choice as one of the first
 things they do, so that a MUA is not installed by default should not
 be an issue. I.e. the output is not lost.

Well, assuming people use the local machine for reading their mails, and
not Thunderbird or so and not GMail and so on, or Zimbra or whatever
else people actually read mails with these days... None of these even do
local message reading.

 By ensuring all logs go to the normal
 log stream there's a much better chance of not losing messages...
 
 The problem is that this data can be quite voluminous. Perhaps a bad
 thing to clog up the logs with that?

Emails due to base64 encoding usually increase everything by 4/3, which
is certainly worse.

Lennart

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Re: F20 System Wide Change: No Default Sendmail

2013-07-22 Thread Lennart Poettering
On Sun, 21.07.13 01:50, Oron Peled (o...@actcom.co.il) wrote:

 On Friday 19 July 2013 15:46:25 Adam Williamson wrote:
  ... We don't set up any mail reader to read this mail out of the box.
 
 OK, I won't count mailx and mutt because we talk about different audience,
 should we open bug-reports for the rest? (kmail? evolution?)

Goog luck filing bugs against Thunderbird, GMail and Zimbra to add
support for local mail queue reading...

  No app is very likely to know your user name and send mail to you.
 
 Cron was already mentioned, but every one seem to ignore the fact that
 regular users don't have permission to read system logs.

journald actually splits out user logs and use filesystem ACLs to ensure
that the user gets read access to his own logs. This doesn't work for
syslog (and also not if cron first collects all logs and then logs them
as root).

Lennart

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Re: F20 System Wide Change: No Default Sendmail

2013-07-22 Thread Lennart Poettering
On Mon, 22.07.13 18:50, Nicolas Mailhot (nicolas.mail...@laposte.net) wrote:

 
 Le Lun 22 juillet 2013 18:29, Lennart Poettering a écrit :
 
  If you want to centralize system configuration, rather then services,
  then go ahead and do, that, but actually centralize *the configuration*,
  not the service. In particular, because a centralized client-side SMTP
  service is a really questionnable thing on today's Internet where SMTP
  delivery connections are almost always authenticated by a *user* id. Due
  to that they are generally much better configured in the MUA which
  actually run in the user context instead of a system service which lacks
  all that and where no infrastructure exists for supplying user
  authentication information.
 
 Actually, with the various Fedora MUAs I've used, it ended up being easier
 to configure them to use local MTA as relay than to try to convince them
 individually to do anything more complex than 'non-encrypted smtp without
 auth' (when the options existed they changed every few MUA versions and I
 got tired of re-parametring them all the time). Bonus point is that
 changing the relay options fixes all MUAs in one go, I got free logging of
 the MUA activity, and a send queue that does not depend on running the MUA
 when the network comes back.

I find it quite amazing that you actually use multiple different MUAs in
parallel. I mean, most people stick to one MUA usually, maybe two. But
you make it sound as if you need to access your emails through 5 or 10
or so, so that it is really worth making this kind of low-level
configuration change.

It's also hardly something we can suggest people to actively do. User
credentials should not leak into the system like that. If two users send
emails on the same host, then the SMTP delivery needs to provide proper
authentication to the mail gateway attributing the individual mails to
the right user. You lose that by always going via your local MTA. It
certainly works for single-user systems but this generally not how we do
things on Linux, where user and system configuration in general and
authentication credentials in particular are strictly isolated.

Lennart

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Re: F20 System Wide Change: No Default Sendmail

2013-07-22 Thread Lennart Poettering
On Sun, 21.07.13 16:09, Reindl Harald (h.rei...@thelounge.net) wrote:

 
 Am 21.07.2013 16:05, schrieb Matthew Miller:
  On Sun, Jul 21, 2013 at 08:58:39AM +0200, Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
  it. Yet the something better never materialized. When I had a disk go
  wrong lately I was notified by the big ugly legacy system. I had *zero*
  notification by all the better systems that were given as evidence.
  Because the better systems do not exist. None of the 'smtpd is legacy
  complainers have actually tried to solve the (remote) notification
  problem, none of them actually understand the reliability and operational
  constrains, or that being to define message routing (via aliases,
  
  Sure they do. I can't imagine an installation of any size (eg more than 2
  systems) not using Nagios, Icigna, or some other alerting system.
  
  If you're in the narrow case between a desktop system and an installation
  where real monitoring and alerting is worth it, install an MTA
 
 the problem i see is when things like MTA and rsyslog are
 removed from the defualt install many pakcgers will less
 care about them in the future nor test how well it works

This is not a valid argument. We cannot keep extending the core all the
time by adding more and more redundant components to them, just because
we believe this will cause APIs to be tested. It's the wrong approach in
every way. As we all know the current sendmail setup means mails are
lost in a /dev/null-like mail spool nobody reads. So we know right now
that the current situation is certainly really broken. What have we done
so far about it? Just ignored it, and continued to let the mail spools
run over with mails that are ignored. The few people who cared didn't
mind because they were the ones who reconfigured the aliases file or the
entire MTA in a way that actually made it useful. But that's a pretty
borked situation and unfair to everybody not in the know...

You get your stuff well-tested by removing redundancy, by making your
stuff interesting to people and by making sure people who care test
it. It's not enough just put on a system where nobody cares about it. It
didn't fix the local MTA situation in the past 10 years and it won't in
the next.

Also, what kind of a picture does this paint of the Fedora project
anyway? Only stuff we install by default matters and is tested? If that
was the case the only answer could be to drop all
non-installed-by-default packages from the dirstro... - but that would
just be so wrong

Lennart

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Re: F20 System Wide Change: No Default Sendmail

2013-07-22 Thread Nicolas Mailhot

Le Lun 22 juillet 2013 19:28, Matthew Miller a écrit :
 On Mon, Jul 22, 2013 at 06:53:24PM +0200, Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
 What makes cron and smtpd work well together is that they both perform
 async background computing. And many cron messages are not logs
 they're
 notifications of an event the cron is polling for, or submission of job
 results.

 Honest, non-loaded question here. Do you really find them default cron
 output mode helpful?

I think sending all cron output by email is useful, in the sense that it
pushes errors for the user to fix instead of failing silently (or with
another line in the system logs no one will read since they're swamped by
gdm, networkmanager and a few other chatty system services). I do not
think cron jobs that output something every time they are run just in case
are nice.

I do not think the way we let systems install without a configured smtp
backend is good. If cron mails were actually pushed by default the bad
crons would be fixed before doing any real damage. A lot of the problems
people complain of here are the direct product of not configuring the smtp
backend a install time for years.

I do not think the default cron message envelope is any good. It does not
make enough effort to identify the system and cron job which is failing,
and is not localized.

I do think neither the transient GNOME notifications, nor burying events
in logs only root can consult are appropriate except for the most routine
and uninteresting events.

I do not think that for regular output (ie job results, intended
notifications not script crashes) direct cron to smtpd is ideal. The best
path should be
app/cron/script → backend notification center (evaluation of all system
notifications, standard formatting, localization, triaging)
→ (routing)
→ consumer (DE notification center, logs, specialized
apps, human in MUA)

with in many cases routing = smtpd → imap box → remote consumer. There can
be different imap boxes for each human user of the system, for the
operator of the system (operator can be it-knowledgeable nephew,
it-slave-boyfriend, helpdesk or central monitoring/alert system). Some of
them can be consulted via the DE notification GUI, not necessarily by a
MUA (just requires defining how you serialize notifications in mail
attachment, and teaching the notification center to read an imap box and
remove each message when the user confirms he's done with it, and leave it
in the remote mailbox for future processing otherwise)

A lot of notifications do not require immediate action. What they do
require is some action in the future. For those I do want them to hang out
on an imap server till I take care of them, and I definitely do not want
to be only able to see them when I log in on the exact system they
originated from, or only at the notification time.

I do think the only widely deployed vendor-agnostic remote messaging
infrastructure is the mail infrastructure. All the other solutions require
always-on receiving nodes, that end-users can not afford.

I do think the notification infrastructure needs to be able to handle the
results produced by user crontabs, and the entry points need to be simple
enough the crontab user does not have to think about them.

I do think the basic app (something) smtp architecture is sound, even if
it does need some refreshing and formatting cleanup. I do think that
commodisation will result in multiple computing nodes in every home, and
that being able to push notifications to a machine-agnostic store will
prove just as compelling end-user-side as it was in university campuses
when cron was first wed with sendmail.

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Re: F20 System Wide Change: No Default Sendmail

2013-07-22 Thread Lennart Poettering
On Mon, 22.07.13 16:04, Miloslav Trmač (m...@volny.cz) wrote:

 On Sun, Jul 21, 2013 at 9:20 PM, Matthew Miller mat...@mattdm.org wrote:
  On Sun, Jul 21, 2013 at 04:09:32PM +0200, Reindl Harald wrote:
  the problem i see is when things like MTA and rsyslog are
  removed from the defualt install many pakcgers will less
  care about them in the future nor test how well it works
 
  That's a separate issue. MTAs and syslog are going to be needed for many
  very important use cases for years to come. That doesn't mean we need to
  install them by default.
 
 It's not really separate.
 
 We don't have any canonical developer documentation that says what is
 or isn't a part of the OS, and good Linux applications are expected
 to use; we only have traditions, word of mouth, and de-facto
 standards. In this situation, what is or isn't enabled by default and
 shipped by default matters more than saying are going to be needed
 for years to come - the actions speak louder than the words.
 
 Think of these debates as attempts to, after all the years, agree on
 and write down what the traditions and de-facto standards actually
 are.
 Mirek

If you argue from the viewpoint of how universially available an API is
to make it standard, then I would like to remind you that there are
probably more Ubuntu installations in the world thatn Fedora
installations, and they haven't included any MTA by default in 6 years
or so.

Lennart

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Re: F20 System Wide Change: No Default Sendmail

2013-07-22 Thread Nicolas Mailhot

Le Lun 22 juillet 2013 20:40, Lennart Poettering a écrit :

 I find it quite amazing that you actually use multiple different MUAs in
 parallel. I mean, most people stick to one MUA usually, maybe two. But
 you make it sound as if you need to access your emails through 5 or 10
 or so, so that it is really worth making this kind of low-level
 configuration change.

Well, if the various MUAs shipped in Fedora didn't periodically suffer
from bugs, I wouldn't need to switch regularly (actually since I installed
squirrelmail I don't need switching anymore. It just works, and does not
think duplicating every mail in a private store to simulate pop3 behaviour
is a requisite. So I just point it to the system maildir)

 It's also hardly something we can suggest people to actively do. User
 credentials should not leak into the system like that. If two users send
 emails on the same host, then the SMTP delivery needs to provide proper
 authentication to the mail gateway attributing the individual mails to
 the right user.

I didn't write anything else. What I did write is that, at this point in
time, it's probably easier to add the 'send as different used depending on
the system user' to the central MTA (and make smtp an actual system
service) than to try to fix all the MUAs Fedora ships.

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Re: F20 System Wide Change: No Default Sendmail

2013-07-22 Thread Nicolas Mailhot

Le Lun 22 juillet 2013 20:23, Adam Williamson a écrit :

 Just before this one gets any worse: it was Nicolas Mailhot who started
 talking about banks sending email for some reason, not Miloslav.

Please do not attribute me what I didn't write. I didn't bring banks in
the discussion.

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Re: F20 System Wide Change: No Default Sendmail

2013-07-22 Thread Nicolas Mailhot

Le Lun 22 juillet 2013 20:52, Lennart Poettering a écrit :

 This is not a valid argument. We cannot keep extending the core all the
 time by adding more and more redundant components to them, just because
 we believe this will cause APIs to be tested.

No one is asking to extend the core. You are asking to redefine it that's
not the same.

 Also, what kind of a picture does this paint of the Fedora project
 anyway? Only stuff we install by default matters and is tested?

Not configuring what we install does not paint a good image of the
project. OTOH, the MTAs themselves are several orders of magnitude more
robust than all the other bits we install (including, right now, systemd).
So the picture is clearly mixed.

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Re: F20 System Wide Change: No Default Sendmail

2013-07-22 Thread Lennart Poettering
On Mon, 22.07.13 19:19, Miloslav Trmač (m...@volny.cz) wrote:

 On Mon, Jul 22, 2013 at 7:00 PM, Lennart Poettering
 mzerq...@0pointer.de wrote:
  On Mon, 22.07.13 18:43, Miloslav Trmač (m...@volny.cz) wrote:
 
  On Mon, Jul 22, 2013 at 6:36 PM, Lennart Poettering
  mzerq...@0pointer.de wrote:
   On Fri, 19.07.13 20:22, Miloslav Trmač (m...@volny.cz) wrote:
  
   On Fri, Jul 19, 2013 at 8:16 PM, Matthew Miller
   mat...@fedoraproject.org wrote:
   Where expected to do means effectively route it to /dev/null?
 
  It's actually less similar to /dev/null than log files are - log files
  are rotated and deleted, mail stays in the mail boxes until explicitly
  deleted (or space runs out).
 
  Well, so it's even a DoS... Just find some trigger to generate a lot of
  mails to root and /var will eventually fill up, even beyond those 10%
  reserved for root, since well, mail to root is accounted to root...
 
 My concern about this proposal doesn't actually depend on local
 delivery, it _could_ go to /dev/null by default for all I care.

What a crappy API is that?

 I'll note, however, that this is a DoS is rarely a convincing
 argument - the only practical way to combat a DoS is to impose some
 kind of limit, which is just a DoS of a different kind.  You get to
 choose _what_ kinds of DoS your computer will be subject to, but with
 finite CPU power and storage you can't avoid DoS situations.

The point I am trying to make is that if you have something that is
vulnerable to a DoS attack you need to have a strategy to handle
that. You need to keep the attack local, isolated as much as you can
from the rest of the system and other clients. A strategy of hey, yeah,
let's queue this all up and allow unprivileged clients to bring down the
entire system by easily flooding /var is a bad strategy, an
embarrassingly bad one. It's a DoS that is the opposite of local.

 And, philosophically, silently losing data is generally much worse
 than requiring manual intervention for the system to run when space
 runs out.  (Not that the mails we sent by default are _that_ valuable,
 though.)
 Mirek

If we drop data we definitely always need to keep track of that and
account it, no doubt. (journald does keep track of messages dropped via
per-service/per-priority ratelimit, and it will tell you how far back
history in the logs reach)

Lennart

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Re: F20 System Wide Change: No Default Sendmail

2013-07-22 Thread Adam Williamson
On Mon, 2013-07-22 at 21:10 +0200, Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
 Le Lun 22 juillet 2013 20:23, Adam Williamson a écrit :
 
  Just before this one gets any worse: it was Nicolas Mailhot who started
  talking about banks sending email for some reason, not Miloslav.
 
 Please do not attribute me what I didn't write. I didn't bring banks in
 the discussion.

Oh, sorry, that's right - you cited 'Google and Amazon', and someone
extended the example later.
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Re: F20 System Wide Change: No Default Sendmail

2013-07-22 Thread Billy Crook
On Mon, Jul 22, 2013 at 11:41 AM, Lennart Poettering
mzerq...@0pointer.de wrote:
 On Fri, 19.07.13 13:17, Billy Crook (billycr...@gmail.com) wrote:
 Sendmail stays in Default unless there is compelling reason to switch to
 postfix, exim, meta1, etc.  Those users who wish to remove it are welcome
 to do so.  Nobody is stopping them. The default configuration of sendmail
 poses no problem to users who are unaware of it.

 Not true. I eats my cron logs and other stuff and I have no way to get
 the stuff out of it again with the core install...

If that's not hyperbole, then please clarify what eats refers to.
Or just take the 30 seconds or so to setup the MTA correctly, and all
of that stuff will be waiting for you in your inbox.  If you don't
want it mixed with human-originated mail, as some have complained,
then use filters to auto sort your mail.


 Please voice yourself at meetings in #fedora-devel if this is important to
 you.

 Yes, please, post a lot of +1 messages. They contribute so positively
 (I mean, literally!) to any discussion. +1 messages are really good
 for making a point as they contain so much additional arguments nobody
 has heard or read before. It's almost as constructive posting +1s, as
 it is posting sarcastic comments about their pointlessness...

There's not much else to do when it seems a lot of otherwise very
intelligent people still don't get it.  I'm certain that you are all
aware of how useful an MTA can be.  Choosing to cut it off rather than
properly configuring it, is rather un-fedora-like.  Why not remove
ipv6 support, since gosh it's hard too and who configures it?  And it
doesn't work for most people without explicit configuration.

Removing it (even just from the Default install) is wrong.


On Mon, Jul 22, 2013 at 12:28 PM, Matthew Miller
mat...@fedoraproject.org wrote:
 On Mon, Jul 22, 2013 at 06:53:24PM +0200, Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
 What makes cron and smtpd work well together is that they both perform
 async background computing. And many cron messages are not logs they're
 notifications of an event the cron is polling for, or submission of job
 results.

 Honest, non-loaded question here. Do you really find them default cron
 output mode helpful? You suggested earlier that I dislike cron's e-mail
 output, and while I hadn't brought up likes or dislikes before, I really
 don't find it so great. To me, it just fills up my mailbox with:

Jul 02 Cron DaemonCron root@hpc ionice -c3 run-parts /etc/cro
Jul 02 AnacronAnacron job 'cron.daily' on bigcomputer.home.
...
Jul 02 Cron DaemonCron root@hpc ionice -c3 run-parts /etc/cro

 If I did want e-mail output -- which I used to, before I had proper alerting
 set up, so as I mentioned before I totally recognize that use case -- I
 really would like it with a meaningful subject line, which means even when
 running out of cron, the jobs should actually call sendmail or /usr/bin/mail
 directly with pretty-formatted output. (And thus, have an explicit
 dependency on an MTA, and also basically have the expectation that they're
 running on a system which will be properly configured for its environment,
 however that happens.)

If you are getting a message from a cronjob, it is a pretty good
indicator that something went wrong, and you need to take action to
correct it.  So yes.  It's pretty important.Depending on cronjobs
to send notifications on their own failures, is poor design because if
they have failed, they could easily fail to notify.  This is why
cron's (albeit ugly) notifications when a job turns up stdout/err, are
valuable.


On Mon, Jul 22, 2013 at 1:58 PM, Nicolas Mailhot
nicolas.mail...@laposte.net wrote:
 I do not
 think cron jobs that output something every time they are run just in case
 are nice.

I agree.  Those are usually, crappy cronjobs and should be fixed to
work like most unix tools, and output only on failure.

 I do not think the way we let systems install without a configured smtp
 backend is good. If cron mails were actually pushed by default the bad
 crons would be fixed before doing any real damage. A lot of the problems
 people complain of here are the direct product of not configuring the smtp
 backend a install time for years.

EXACTLY.  Improving the INSTALLER and firstlogin experience is what is
needed here, NOT removing MTA.

 I do not think the default cron message envelope is any good. It does not
 make enough effort to identify the system and cron job which is failing,
 and is not localized.

This is another area to improve.  Again NOT removing MTA, but using it smarter.

 I do think the only widely deployed vendor-agnostic remote messaging
 infrastructure is the mail infrastructure. All the other solutions require
 always-on receiving nodes, that end-users can not afford.
 https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel

Mail has its faults, but is the best option that is universally
available.  Let's build upon it rather than abandoning it.

Re: F20 System Wide Change: No Default Sendmail

2013-07-22 Thread Robert Nichols

On 07/22/2013 11:36 AM, Lennart Poettering wrote:

 I am pretty sure that most of the stuff we currently mail
(like the log output of cron jobs) simply makes no sense as mail, and
should much rather be treated exactly like all other log output. There's
nothing special really about cron that would make it so much better
suitable for sending out its logs per mail, rather then just log them.


How many megabytes can the log system reasonably accept in a single message?
The output from a cron job can be a lot more than what anyone would
consider to be a reasonable log message.

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Re: F20 System Wide Change: No Default Sendmail

2013-07-22 Thread Lennart Poettering
On Mon, 22.07.13 15:26, Robert Nichols (rnicholsnos...@comcast.net) wrote:

 On 07/22/2013 11:36 AM, Lennart Poettering wrote:
  I am pretty sure that most of the stuff we currently mail
 (like the log output of cron jobs) simply makes no sense as mail, and
 should much rather be treated exactly like all other log output. There's
 nothing special really about cron that would make it so much better
 suitable for sending out its logs per mail, rather then just log them.
 
 How many megabytes can the log system reasonably accept in a single message?
 The output from a cron job can be a lot more than what anyone would
 consider to be a reasonable log message.

journald is in theory fine with 2^64 bytes per message. In practice (due
to the CPU cost of compressing large blobs with XZ while we write it to
disk) a few MB should be fine. Also, cronie will split up the messages
by line anyway if it logs to syslog instead of sendmail.

Lennart

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Re: F20 System Wide Change: No Default Sendmail

2013-07-22 Thread Matthew Miller
On Tue, Jul 23, 2013 at 12:36:19AM +0200, Lennart Poettering wrote:
 journald is in theory fine with 2^64 bytes per message. In practice (due
 to the CPU cost of compressing large blobs with XZ while we write it to
 disk) a few MB should be fine. Also, cronie will split up the messages
 by line anyway if it logs to syslog instead of sendmail.

That seems less good -- is there a way to reassemble the messages.

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Re: F20 System Wide Change: No Default Sendmail

2013-07-22 Thread Lennart Poettering
On Mon, 22.07.13 19:29, Matthew Miller (mat...@fedoraproject.org) wrote:

 On Tue, Jul 23, 2013 at 12:36:19AM +0200, Lennart Poettering wrote:
  journald is in theory fine with 2^64 bytes per message. In practice (due
  to the CPU cost of compressing large blobs with XZ while we write it to
  disk) a few MB should be fine. Also, cronie will split up the messages
  by line anyway if it logs to syslog instead of sendmail.
 
 That seems less good -- is there a way to reassemble the messages.

It does have clear advantages though: You can get a live view into the
output of a long-running job. If you queue everything up and only submit
it as one blob then the job would be completely opaque until complete.

With systemd's own job handling we generally only use line-by-line
loggin, but provide useful tools to then view them as one continous
stream (journalctl -u foobar.service -o cat for example).

But anyway, the journal doesn't make any restrictions. Whatever
philosophy services like cron prefer on this, we handle either.

Lennart

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Re: F20 System Wide Change: No Default Sendmail

2013-07-22 Thread Oron Peled
On Monday 22 July 2013 21:00:36 Lennart Poettering wrote:
 If you argue from the viewpoint of how universially available an API is
 to make it standard, then I would like to remind you that there are
 probably more Ubuntu installations in the world thatn Fedora
 installations, and they haven't included any MTA by default in 6 years
 or so.

Finally I know what I was missing all these years ;-)

[sorry, it was just too good, though you have a valid point]

BTW: nobody ever answered how desktop users are supposed to read the
 output of their cron-jobs (they don't have permissions to read logs).

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Re: F20 System Wide Change: No Default Sendmail

2013-07-22 Thread Matthew Miller
On Tue, Jul 23, 2013 at 03:14:32AM +0300, Oron Peled wrote:
 BTW: nobody ever answered how desktop users are supposed to read the
  output of their cron-jobs (they don't have permissions to read logs).

They do have permissions to read journal entries that come from their
userid. 

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Re: F20 System Wide Change: No Default Sendmail

2013-07-22 Thread Lennart Poettering
On Tue, 23.07.13 03:14, Oron Peled (o...@actcom.co.il) wrote:

 On Monday 22 July 2013 21:00:36 Lennart Poettering wrote:
  If you argue from the viewpoint of how universially available an API is
  to make it standard, then I would like to remind you that there are
  probably more Ubuntu installations in the world thatn Fedora
  installations, and they haven't included any MTA by default in 6 years
  or so.
 
 Finally I know what I was missing all these years ;-)
 
 [sorry, it was just too good, though you have a valid point]
 
 BTW: nobody ever answered how desktop users are supposed to read the
  output of their cron-jobs (they don't have permissions to read logs).

Actually, if you'd look closely it has been answered 3 times now,
already, just on this thread.

Lennart

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Re: F20 System Wide Change: No Default Sendmail

2013-07-22 Thread Oron Peled

Hi,

On Monday 22 July 2013 20:33:32 Lennart Poettering wrote:
 On Sun, 21.07.13 01:50, Oron Peled (o...@actcom.co.il) wrote:
  OK, I won't count mailx and mutt because we talk about different audience,
  should we open bug-reports for the rest? (kmail? evolution?)
 
 Goog luck filing bugs against Thunderbird, GMail and Zimbra to add
 support for local mail queue reading...

Hmmm... I didn't know any of them was installed by *default*.
After all, the issue is *default* setup, isn't it?

[bit-off-topic: unlike the others you mentioned, Thunderbird is a local MUA.
 Not being able to process any local mailbox (mbox/maildir/whatever)
 was the primary reason I never used it -- I cannot afford loosing
 almost 20 years of email history, much less convert it to some HTML
 based private format]

  Cron was already mentioned, but every one seem to ignore the fact that
  regular users don't have permission to read system logs.
 
 journald actually splits out user logs and use filesystem ACLs to ensure
 that the user gets read access to his own logs. This doesn't work for
 syslog (and also not if cron first collects all logs and then logs them
 as root).

[thanks for referring to this issue. In a separate sub-thread I complained
 about not being addressed before seeing this mail]

There are two issues however:
 * The log-splitting of journald is really nice feature. But it doesn't
   work for cron:
$ echo '* * * * * /bin/echo Test output from cron' | \
 crontab '-'# than wait a minute
$ journalctl# only shows crontab, not the cron output
$ su -
# journalctl# Cron output is properly shown.

   So this issue is still outstanding (but I'll bet you knew that)

 * Logs are inherently line-oriented (which is very good for their
   intended use case). However, many cron-jobs produce various reports
   which are multi-line in their nature -- not a very good fit.

IMO a reasonable path may be:
 * Not installing MTA at all for the *minimal* case.

 * Install MTA for the default case (especially desktops).

 * In that case, no SMTP port listening is needed. The default use
   case is about the ability to deliver messages by piping them
   to the MTA. No application/tool that I know of, tries to notify
   by sending to STMP on localhost (am I wrong here?)

 * Automatic mail-alias of root to the installing user will go a long
   way to make it more visible/useful.

 * Adding local mailbox as default configuration of MUA's (at least
   those installed by default for desktops) is even better.

Bye,

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Re: F20 System Wide Change: No Default Sendmail

2013-07-22 Thread Oron Peled

Hi,

On Monday 22 July 2013 21:15:14 Lennart Poettering wrote:
 The point I am trying to make is that if you have something that is
 vulnerable to a DoS attack you need to have a strategy to handle
 that.

A very simple strategy exists -- alias root's mail to a regular user.

I previously said it should be done during installation for usability
reasons -- now you've just added another good reason.

Please note that this is relevant even for the suggested world
of non-MTA-by-default, because some people (horror, shock, awe)
may actually install one.
(unless DoS traps are OK for non-default installed packages...)

Bye,

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Re: F20 System Wide Change: No Default Sendmail

2013-07-21 Thread Nicolas Mailhot

Le Sam 20 juillet 2013 21:14, Adam Williamson a écrit :

 I asked for evidence, not hypotheses. All you are currently doing is
 making an assertion, over and over and over and over again.

Pot, kettle

I'll add another one: desktop people have complained for years just like
you it was a legacy system and surely something better should replace
it. Yet the something better never materialized. When I had a disk go
wrong lately I was notified by the big ugly legacy system. I had *zero*
notification by all the better systems that were given as evidence.
Because the better systems do not exist. None of the 'smtpd is legacy
complainers have actually tried to solve the (remote) notification
problem, none of them actually understand the reliability and operational
constrains, or that being to define message routing (via aliases,
procmailrc, sieve, etc) and having solid queuing is integral to the
messaging stack fitness. Indeed the sole contribution to the notification
question by our default desktop has been to hide notifications since it
didn't really know what to do with them (and systemd killed the applet
that used to warn users when a service failed at startup)

So please do come back when there is some actual tangible progress on this
front.

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Re: F20 System Wide Change: No Default Sendmail

2013-07-21 Thread drago01
On Sun, Jul 21, 2013 at 8:58 AM, Nicolas Mailhot
nicolas.mail...@laposte.net wrote:

 Le Sam 20 juillet 2013 21:14, Adam Williamson a écrit :

 I asked for evidence, not hypotheses. All you are currently doing is
 making an assertion, over and over and over and over again.

 Pot, kettle

 I'll add another one: desktop people have complained for years just like
 you it was a legacy system and surely something better should replace
 it. Yet the something better never materialized. When I had a disk go
 wrong lately I was notified by the big ugly legacy system. I had *zero*
 notification by all the better systems that were given as evidence.

That's good for you but most user wouldn't even have noticed the mail.
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Re: F20 System Wide Change: No Default Sendmail

2013-07-21 Thread Nicolas Mailhot

Le Dim 21 juillet 2013 09:17, drago01 a écrit :
 On Sun, Jul 21, 2013 at 8:58 AM, Nicolas Mailhot
 nicolas.mail...@laposte.net wrote:

 Le Sam 20 juillet 2013 21:14, Adam Williamson a écrit :

 I asked for evidence, not hypotheses. All you are currently doing is
 making an assertion, over and over and over and over again.

 Pot, kettle

 I'll add another one: desktop people have complained for years just like
 you it was a legacy system and surely something better should replace
 it. Yet the something better never materialized. When I had a disk go
 wrong lately I was notified by the big ugly legacy system. I had *zero*
 notification by all the better systems that were given as evidence.

 That's good for you but most user wouldn't even have noticed the mail.

Then make something better. Removing the system you feel is not good
enough is not making something better, it's hoping for someone else to
scratch your hitch.
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Re: F20 System Wide Change: No Default Sendmail

2013-07-21 Thread Matthew Miller
On Sun, Jul 21, 2013 at 08:58:39AM +0200, Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
 it. Yet the something better never materialized. When I had a disk go
 wrong lately I was notified by the big ugly legacy system. I had *zero*
 notification by all the better systems that were given as evidence.
 Because the better systems do not exist. None of the 'smtpd is legacy
 complainers have actually tried to solve the (remote) notification
 problem, none of them actually understand the reliability and operational
 constrains, or that being to define message routing (via aliases,

Sure they do. I can't imagine an installation of any size (eg more than 2
systems) not using Nagios, Icigna, or some other alerting system.

If you're in the narrow case between a desktop system and an installation
where real monitoring and alerting is worth it, install an MTA.

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Re: F20 System Wide Change: No Default Sendmail

2013-07-21 Thread Matthew Miller
On Sun, Jul 21, 2013 at 11:20:27AM +0200, Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
 Then make something better. Removing the system you feel is not good
 enough is not making something better, it's hoping for someone else to
 scratch your hitch.

I don't think this hyperbole is useful to the conversation. First, no one is
suggesting getting rid of e-mail. Second, the move to remove it sendmail
from default actually _because_ those things exist; hoping for someone
else is not part of the motivation.

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Re: F20 System Wide Change: No Default Sendmail

2013-07-21 Thread Reindl Harald

Am 21.07.2013 16:05, schrieb Matthew Miller:
 On Sun, Jul 21, 2013 at 08:58:39AM +0200, Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
 it. Yet the something better never materialized. When I had a disk go
 wrong lately I was notified by the big ugly legacy system. I had *zero*
 notification by all the better systems that were given as evidence.
 Because the better systems do not exist. None of the 'smtpd is legacy
 complainers have actually tried to solve the (remote) notification
 problem, none of them actually understand the reliability and operational
 constrains, or that being to define message routing (via aliases,
 
 Sure they do. I can't imagine an installation of any size (eg more than 2
 systems) not using Nagios, Icigna, or some other alerting system.
 
 If you're in the narrow case between a desktop system and an installation
 where real monitoring and alerting is worth it, install an MTA

the problem i see is when things like MTA and rsyslog are
removed from the defualt install many pakcgers will less
care about them in the future nor test how well it works

if here is not taken really care over the long the capability
write wahtever shellscript for a cronjob and whatever goes
wrong echo it simply to produce a notify mail may disappear
as well as such outputs can be large and are not for the journal



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Re: F20 System Wide Change: No Default Sendmail

2013-07-21 Thread Nicolas Mailhot

Le Dim 21 juillet 2013 16:05, Matthew Miller a écrit :
 On Sun, Jul 21, 2013 at 08:58:39AM +0200, Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
 it. Yet the something better never materialized. When I had a disk go
 wrong lately I was notified by the big ugly legacy system. I had *zero*
 notification by all the better systems that were given as evidence.
 Because the better systems do not exist. None of the 'smtpd is legacy
 complainers have actually tried to solve the (remote) notification
 problem, none of them actually understand the reliability and
 operational
 constrains, or that being to define message routing (via aliases,

 Sure they do. I can't imagine an installation of any size (eg more than 2
 systems) not using Nagios, Icigna, or some other alerting system.

And none of those is a general solution, they've never agreed to a common
API which has a reasonable chance to be available by default, so no app is
going to target them. They're all an optional overlay to the default
system tools, that processes a very narrow subset of notifications and
requires dedicated tools and people.

 If you're in the narrow case between a desktop system and an installation
 where real monitoring and alerting is worth it, install an MTA.

Where is the desktop notification solution in Fedora? There is none able
to even remotely approach the capabilities of the cron + MTA bits you so
dislike. Even running the latest and greatest rawhide nothing desktop-side
caught a very basic event like a failing disk! The only state-of-the-art
part of our notification chain is the smtpd element, everything else is
hacks or unfinished prototypes (state-of-the-art as in, what are Google
and Amazon using to notify their users of events? Mail messages! They
would be ROFL if they were reading this conversation. If it's not done yet
I predict they'll integrate their phones and tablets and notify you of
problems by mail in the next years.)

The limit if there is one is between standalone Fedora and server with
lots of external infrastucture, and this later use-case has never
justified removing built-in capabilities. Fedora is batteries included,
not can't do anything by default, add third-party tools Solaris.

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Re: F20 System Wide Change: No Default Sendmail

2013-07-21 Thread Steve Clark

On 07/21/2013 03:17 AM, drago01 wrote:

On Sun, Jul 21, 2013 at 8:58 AM, Nicolas Mailhot
nicolas.mail...@laposte.net wrote:

Le Sam 20 juillet 2013 21:14, Adam Williamson a écrit :


I asked for evidence, not hypotheses. All you are currently doing is
making an assertion, over and over and over and over again.

Pot, kettle

I'll add another one: desktop people have complained for years just like
you it was a legacy system and surely something better should replace
it. Yet the something better never materialized. When I had a disk go
wrong lately I was notified by the big ugly legacy system. I had *zero*
notification by all the better systems that were given as evidence.

That's good for you but most user wouldn't even have noticed the mail.

Where are your statistics to back up that wild assertion.

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Re: F20 System Wide Change: No Default Sendmail

2013-07-21 Thread Chris Murphy

On Jul 21, 2013, at 10:55 AM, Nicolas Mailhot nicolas.mail...@laposte.net 
wrote:
  (state-of-the-art as in, what are Google
 and Amazon using to notify their users of events? Mail messages!

If you're talking about google calendar events, email is used only because even 
with Chrome the pop-up notifications only work 1/2 the time. 


 They
 would be ROFL if they were reading this conversation. If it's not done yet
 I predict they'll integrate their phones and tablets and notify you of
 problems by mail in the next years.)

?? So you think it's a good idea to have low battery, critical software 
updates, maybe a virus alert, appear to the user in an email? That really makes 
no sense, but I'm otherwise not thinking what else you mean by the above.

I think email is craptastic. There's too much of it in all forms. But the worst 
is the kind that comes from automated systems. I want less of this, not more of 
it. The email UA paradigm is still overwhelmingly chronologically based. The 
attempts to prioritize emails still lack sufficient granularity, even with a 
lot of work (and on-going work). And it fails miserably on mobile for the 
typical user with 1-3 email accounts, so an email of a hard drive failure gets 
mixed in with Aunt Edna needing her gall bladder removed in emergency surgery 
and Sally who just got a new puppy. Email sucks as a notification system.


Chris Murphy
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