what does a sysadmin do with root mail and other stuff?

[someone_4]

Hey everyone.
We have about 20 hpux boxes. And I have set up some tools for me to be able to monitor syslog. And other things like that. But I was wondering what do I do about root@host mail?
Should I forward everyones mail to one host so I can keep an eye on it? Or should I even worry about mail? If anyone has some more system adim thoughts or ideas that I should impliment please share them.

Richard

[Sachin Patel · Accepted solution]

Hi Richard,
We have around 50 big servers. all of systems root mail goes to support team. Everyday an average I receives 50 to 100 email.
This is good in a way. Some time you can catch a problem before it happens. like someone try to su -, some hardware error etc..
Honestly I remove all root email every two days.

Sachin

[Mark Vollmers]

Richard-

I like to keep an eye on root mail to make sure stuff like backup didn't have any problems. It also tells me if the online diagnostics found something. I just have the one server, though, so it is easy to keep track of. I'd figure out some way to look at it, though, since you'd miss some important stuff otherwise.

mark

[A. Clay Stephenson]

Hi Richard,

My favorite way to do this berfore IT/O was to forward all root mail to my unix workstation. It's much easier to monitor the mail when it's in one place.

With 20 servers, you really need to start thinking about a
more systematic approach using VantagePoint/Operations (formally IT/O). You create templates and monitor scripts to monitor essentially any service or resource you are interested in. All of your servers (which can include NT, Novell, other flavors of UNIX) monitor themseleves and report problems to a central location. The system can then take action, notify you by email or pager, etc.

This stuff is not cheap nor is the learning curve gentle but it's really the only way to monitor truly critical services. In my case, the cost of an hour's downtime easily exceeds the cost of implementation by a factor of 10.

Clay

[linuxfan]

Hi Richard,

Just update the aliases file to indicate which users you want to forward root's mail to. Even easier if you are using NIS and are already using aliases map.
Only thing is if you are using nis map aliases, then make sure you update the /etc/nsswitch.conf on all the machines to look at nis also.
Once that's done, update your aliases file on your nis master and add a line for root. Eg:
root: user1@host1.com,user3@host2.com,user3,user4

Don't forget to push out the maps once you modify the file.

As far as what do you do with mails, you can set up filters in most of the mail clients or if you want you write scripts to parse out emails.

-HTH
I am RU

[Scott_14]

hello:

We have about 20 severs as welll, but we set up root's mail to go to an aliase which would be me and one other admin.
That way any critical message we get.

[Joseph C. Denman]

Hi Richard,

I forward all of root's email to my administrator account on my pc. This has 2 advantages:

1. One central point to check mail.
2. Keeps from having to go clean the root mail file on all the servers.


...jcd...

[James R. Ferguson]

Hi Richard:

Forwarding your mail to a common mailbox makes your life easier -- one stop reading.

In addition, for scripts that you control, consider formatting all the subject lines of your messages to indicate the class of the event -- an advisory ("Note:" - backup successful); a warning ("Warning:" - some files not backed up) or an error/alert ("Error:" backup failed). In this way you can ignore mail details for things that don't require much attention but *still* have the positive evidence that the process ran and *did* complete successfully.

Regards!

...JRF...