/etc/mailname and cron

[tony B]

On Fri, 2006-04-28 at 13:56 -0300, Derek Broughton wrote:

> 
> Cron didn't generate any mail.  It basically pipes its output to mailx -
> which requires an MTA.  So you _probably_ want to remove your MTA.

The cron.monthly stuff gets run using anacron, I believe.  My comment
that the cron job mails results to root is based on the man page for
anacron which says: 

If  a  job generates any output on its standard output or standard
error, the output is mailed to the user running
       Anacron (usually root), or to the address contained by the MAILTO
environment variable in  the  crontab,  if  such
       exists. If the LOGNAME environment variable is set, it will be
used as From: field.


It may pipe it to something, but I do not have mail or mailx on my
system.  I do have postfix.


> 
> If you're running breezy or earlier, or upgraded from breezy, you probably
> have postfix installed.  If you still want to be able to receive email from
> cron, you can try "sudo dpkg-reconfigure postfix" and make sure that you
> tell it you want local mail delivery only (I'm pretty sure there's an
> option in debconf for that) or, I believe there's a local-only MTA
> available (though I can't seem to find it right now).

Well, I'm running Dapper Beta, but, as I said, it does have postfix, so
I will look into doing as you suggest, i.e., after I read a bit more.  I
do not recall installing postfix, so I presume it comes by default with
Dapper?

> 
> This would be one of the reasons that the developers decided that it was
> _not_ a good idea to install an MTA by default :-)

<chuckle> I followed that thread for a while, but it got a little heated
for my taste.  And the details were somewhat over my head. :)

Thanks again for your help, Derek.  I appreciate it.

tony