Reasons for ikeeping an MTA

[Scott Henson]

Lukas Sabota wrote:

>>
> There needs to be some easy way of alerting the administrator of some
> things that have been done using mail:
> Failed login attemps (remote and local)
> Failed backups
> Important cron scripts failing.
>
I think there is a point where people are missing eachother at.  Things
like the above would most likely be seen on a server using server type
software that doesn't have a GUI and normal desktop users are not likely
to see.  For the most part, the failed login attempts that your going to
worry about(if your not paranoid and not living/working with people you
don't trust) are those for remote services, and since Ubuntu doesn't
have any of those by default the standard home user isn't going to need
to worry about this.

As for backups and cron scripts, I don't think the home user needs to
worry about these either.  Backups on a home system will likely be
handled by a gui program(such as the one done for the google summer of
code) and that won't email the user, it will most likely tell the user
via some gui notification.  I also just looked at /etc/cron.* on a
fairly standard Breezy install and there really isn't anything in there
the user needs to be notified about failing.  If it really needs to be
looked at, the update notifier could be used. 

As for servers and corprate desktops where there might be things running
in cron that would need notification, the administrator is likely to set
that up if they care.  In fact I would argue that this would be the
perfect thing for the Ubuntu Server project to be doing.  Have a
meta-package ask the person doing the install what the administrator's
real email address is and have stuff forwarded there. 

> What's the objection of a leightweight mta being installed by
> default?  Evolution and thunderbird on the admin's account could be
> set by default to receive local mail.
>
I'm really not objecting to an mta being installed.  What I'm saying is
that there has to be a better way of doing this for the default desktop
install.  Having mail queue up in a place that no one is looking at or
sending useless mail to a user's main account are not solutions. 

> Even if there's an objection to a mta, why not use the notifications
> that have been used for postinst stuff like required reboots?
>
The other evening I spent about 30 minutes and about 50 lines of python
on this problem.  My system is currently delivering all mail to root to
the update-notifier via esmtp's mda feature.  Unfortunately it currently
crashes update-notifier on a regular basis and update-notifier isn't
what I would call well documented, so Im having issues understanding
why.  But I think its a possible solution as long as we aren't telling
the user about dangling symlinks in some man directory somewhere.  I
don't even care and I wouldn't characterize myself as a new user.  In
fact there is a fair potential for panic on the part of new users being
told about something like that.  I don't want to hide stuff from new
users, but its just not germain to the use of their computer. 

I think there is a need to be able to notify the user of system events
that matter.  Things like hard drive failures and updated kernels are
perfectly valid things to be notified about.  Dangling symlinks and
debconf welcoming the new user are really not something that I care
about as a user.  I would like to spend more time exploring the
usefulness of my little python script, it seems to solve the problem, at
least for me.