/etc/mailname and cron

[Tony Arnold]

Tony,

tony B wrote:

> 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.

I'm surprised you don't have mail. I thought it was installed by default
on breezy. And indeed I thought cron would depend on it, but I've just
checked and cron depends on postfix or mail-transport-agent.

I think I suggested earlier that you try mailing root and checking the
postfix logs. They are in /var/log/mail.log and /var/log/mail.err. Both
these files may give you a clue about what is happening to mail to root.

But it looks to me like cron/anacron is sending mail to your local root
user, but a config error is causing this to be delivered to your ISP and
not your local machine. You could send me your postfix config file and
I'll take a quick look at them, if you like. The file to send is
/etc/postfix/main.cf. It shouldn't contain anything sensitive such as
passwords, but feel free to mask these out if any are there. Can you
also remind me what is in /etc/mailname again. I'm losing track!

Regards,
Tony.
-- 
Tony Arnold, IT Security Coordinator, University of Manchester,
IT Services Division, Kilburn Building, Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL.
T: +44 (0)161 275 6093, F: +44 (0)870 136 1004, M: +44 (0)773 330 0039
E: tony.arnold at manchester.ac.uk, H: http://www.man.ac.uk/Tony.Arnold