Send mail

[rbarot]

I am new to unix environment. Can anybody help me in configuring send mail ? Also how can I configure critical events happening on server should mail to me automatically?

This site is really very helping to me and I am thankful to all the members.....

[Matti_Kurkela]

You didn't tell what kind of unix/Linux you are configuring, so I can't give you any specific details.

Most unixes and Linux distributions usually have some general configuration tools. On HP-UX, there is "sam", RedHat Linux has redhat-config-* -tools for many things (I think), Debian GNU/Linux asks the necessary information during the installation of sendmail... see the documentation of your unix/Linux for details.

If you need to set up a mail server, I think you would be better off reading O'Reilly's Sendmail book instead of asking here, so I'm going to assume you just want to send mail out of your server. Look for the word "smarthost" in your unix/Linux documentation: "smarthost" means a "central" server where all outgoing mail is sent for further processing.


Automatic emails on critical events:
Most unix-like systems send some OS-related information by email to the system's root account by default. (If your server is named yourhost.example, the default messages would go to root@yourhost.example). To get the messages to your regular mail account, you must create a "mail alias" so that mail to root@yourhost.example is delivered to your.address@some.where.example.

Usually this is done by adding to file /etc/mail/aliases a line like this:

root: your.address@some.where.example

After this, you might have to run "newaliases" command to make the new alias take effect.

To get information about hardware-related critical events, you must usually install the hardware vendor's monitoring software and configure it as you want. Again, this depends greatly on what hardware you have.