Re: sa-update channel detail

Bowie Bailey wrote:
> Sure it does. Any output from the program will be emailed. Cron
> doesn't care if it's error output, update notifications, or just random
> garbage.

I am used to having a funnel of root email going to me as the root administrator but having other subsystem messages go to other people who are in charge of those things. When an error occurs it is great if I get a message to root. I will track those down and drive the error mail sent to root to zero.

But if daily normal things go into that pile too then it is too much. I have seen admins be unable to handle the daily mail from several thousand machines and simply /dev/null the entire thing! (Yes, that is bad. Worse it is not fixing the root cause. And of course judicious use of scripts, procmail and mutt can handle a large concentration of mail. But all of that is off of the main topic here. Let's not go there.)

> And now that I re-read this email, I notice that you mentioned this
> yourself in the previous paragraph, so I'm not sure what you are saying
> here.

Sorry for not being clear. In fact thinking about it more clarifies it to me. I think I do want update notification to be a targeted report of the update to an address that I specify. NOT to the root user who happens to own cron. Errors to root are fine though. Status updates elsewhere. Perhaps /var/log/ is sufficient. Really this isn't something that a lot of time is spent reading in detail so much as an audit trail to track down what has changed when for those times when there are problems and debugging of what happened is needed.

Bob Received on Fri Oct 12 17:10:01 2007