[ On Tuesday, July 24, 2001 at 20:26:22 (-0400), Sam Carleton wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: the daily/weekly/monthly scripts
>
> Well, what I have done is set the $MAILTO enviornment variable in
> daily.conf/weekly.conf/monthly.conf to my normal email address
> scarleton@miltonstreet.com.  When testing the script, my email address ends up
> in the To: field so I do believe that all will work find tonight.  This account
> is on a different machine, but the firewall is able to send mail to it.

Note that'll only catch e-mail sent by those scripts, not any other mail
that might be sent by system jobs to root.....  Setting a single alias
is not only easier (one file to edit, one command to update), but also
guarantees all mail to root will be forwarded.

> P.S.  I did not know that it was a bad thing for root to use a mail program.
> Is that because of virus?  Or something else?

Well, generally speaking you should do as little as possible as root,
regardless of what you're doing.  However with e-mail there are many
more dangers, and many less obvious dangers, even if you use what you
think is a brain-dead-simple mail reader such as /usr/bin/mail.  "Smart"
mail readers are even more likely susceptible to attacks by worms and
the like too.

About the only safe way to read mail as root is with a pager, and even
then you could end up doing something unexpected and possibly dangerous
(pagers like "less" have so many features that unexpected actions can be
triggered even more easily).

-- 
							Greg A. Woods

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Planix, Inc. <woods@planix.com>;   Secrets of the Weird <woods@weird.com>