Sendmail setup in delivery of various system problems and alerts

[Yan Wong]

Hi folks,

I have sendmail daemon running on my unix boxes. Currently, all the problems are sending to root account. If I want to send different local system problems and alerts to individual internet email accounts, apart from adding an entry to /etc/mail/aliases and pointing to those internet email addresses, is there any better way to distribute unix online problem to internet email accounts?

thanks in advance.

[Sridhar Bhaskarla]

Hi,

It depends on which facility is sending the alerts. For ex., all the mails addressed to "mailer-daemon" will go to root. If you want an internet account to receive those mail, then you would change the alias of mailer-daemon to your internet mail address.

If your alerts are user-defined and are customizable, then you can send them to your internet email address. Some are not configurable like cronjobs run by root that fail, will go to root's account. Here you cannot define "only cronjob failures should go to this internet account". The work around is to use mailfilters that can forward the mails based on the "subject" field.

Most of the messages that come to root's account are EMS alerts. EMS is easily configurable to send messages directly to individual mail addresses. Look at 'monconfig' man page. You can configure alerts corresponding to different subsystems to different users.

A simple workaround to achieve what you want is to let everything go to root's account.

Now you can configure a mail filter such as procmail to forward mails of different types to different mail addresses.

http://hpux.cs.utah.edu/hppd/hpux/Networking/Mail/procmail-3.22/

Or, Configure POP or IMAP daemon on the server to receive mails by a sophisticated mail client (like outlook) that can allow you to define rules. Once you start receiving mails on the mail client, you can setup rules and forward messages of different types to different individuals.

-Sri

[Steven E. Protter]

If you prefer popmail, go for qpopper.

http://hpux.cs.utah.edu/hppd/hpux/Networking/Mail/qpopper-4.0.4/

I am told its pretty easy to install.

P