[Infrastructures] email to root?

[John Borwick]

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Vincent McIntyre wrote:
> I don't think this has been covered before...
> 
> So let's say you have a fleet of machines, all cleanly rolled out from
> a gold server, yada yada. All totally rocking along.
> 
> What, if anything, are people doing with mail that traditionally goes
> to the 'root' account on the box?
> I know that as part of the build you can just install a .forward or
> /etc/aliases that sends it all to some particular account within your
> domain that a human is supposed to read, but humans don't scale well.
> Is it our doom to die of boredom from reading endless near-identical
> emails from cron jobs? Say it ain't so!

You must read (or parse) all this mail.  Two years ago at WFU, no one 
was checking postmaster@wfu.edu.  We get some kind of important messages 
sent there.  The same thing goes for 'root' mail.  Software RAID on Red 
Hat EL 3, for example, will email you whenever a software RAID drive dies.

We push out a standard /etc/aliases that sends all postmaster email to 
postmaster@wfu.edu and all other email to another wfu.edu alias.

After you start getting this mail, (1) write filters to parse it out and 
(2) edit logwatch, etc., to send you less content.  As a third option, 
you could write an email bot to parse the mail and summarize it for you.

HTH,
John
-- 
            John Borwick
        System Administrator
       Wake Forest University | web  http://www.wfu.edu/~borwicjh
       Winston-Salem, NC, USA | GPG key ID             0x797326D5

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