On 2020-06-07 09:45, Sad Clouds wrote:
On Sat, 06 Jun 2020 19:37:39 -0400 Greg Troxel <gdt%lexort.com@localhost> wrote:I have a number of machines, and almost all of them send either daily mail or messages on boot, typically to me someplace else. This basically requires an MTAI'm curious, what sort of essential information do these emails provide on a daily basis? Is it simply that some cron job completed successfully? Personally, I would like to see graphs and charts of cpu/memory/disk/network usage. I would like to archive various security and cron logs in a different location, so that hackers cannot easily delete them. If I'm running email/web/database services, I would like to archive all logs, statistics and performance metrics, on a frequent (maybe hourly?) basis. If the database has performance issues at specific times, I would like to be able to go back in history and analyse all logs and metrics. Some of those metrics could be stored in binary files and may need specific tools to extract visual graphs, etc. I don't think sending all that data to my email account is going to be very practical. So at least for how I would like to configure my systems, Postfix does not seem very useful. Yes I can disable it from rc.conf so not a big issue. I'm not asking people to remove Postfix, just trying to understand how useful it is and how many people actually use it.
I would say that postfix, and all things making use of it are just things that you are perhaps not interested in, or have not yet realized could be interesting. You are looking for, and thinking of completely different kind of information, for which obviously postfix is irrelevant.
It may just be a difference in experience and how you use systems. Seems like you have a rather pure user focus perspective, while others here are talking about this from more of a system admin/manager point of view.
You can nowadays get away with just looking at the user perspective. I would possibly argue that this leads to systems that over time degenerate and eventually become unusable, at which point you do a total reinstall, or migrate to a new machine. But that do seem to be a trend...
But some people want systems to run smoothly and correctly for many years, at which point you do want to occasionally check that various parts are running correctly, and that the system maintains its integrity, at which point you should be interested in the daily, weekly and security mails that comes. (I'm still usually also enabling the monthly reports that were turned off by default many years ago...)
Johnny
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