I need an email server, or something

[Lonni J Friedman]

On 10/19/07, Michael Hipp <Michael at hipp.com> wrote:
> Lonni J Friedman wrote:
> > On 10/19/07, Michael Hipp <Michael at hipp.com> wrote:
> >> I support Linux servers scattered hither and yon. I'd like for them to
> >> send me various emails when bad things happen or to report on this or that.
> >>
> >> Problem is, many of them are served by ISPs whose smtp server requires
> >> authentication. I often do not have access to the login credentials. I
> >> don't want to store login credentials for my own email server on these
> >> servers owned by clients (and not under my physical control).
> >> Additionally, lots of these ISPs block outbound port 25.
> >>
> >> Any ideas on how I can get my servers to send me things?
> >>
> >> Is there an email server somewhere I can use?
> >>
> >> Surely I'm not the first to bump up against this.
> >
> > Maybe don't use email?  Can you do snmp or ssh instead?
>
> I hadn't thought of using snmp. How exactly would that work? Which
> direction does it go?

SNMP traditionally works via polling a daemon for information.  The
daemon runs on each remote system, and then you have one centralized
system that collects all of the information.  There are a ton of
different SNMP based tools for doing remote montoring, some with very
fancy web UIs.  Cacti is one of them, but there are a ton more, and
most can send out alerts (via many different mechanism) if some
predefined change in status occurs (or does not occur).

>
> I can ssh into all these boxes. But I wanted something "active" to alert
> me of problems or to just report on routine things (cron jobs, disk
> usage, etc.)

I was just thinking that if you can do ssh, you could automate
something over ssh to check the status of these things.


-- 
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L. Friedman                                    netllama at gmail.com
LlamaLand                       https://netllama.linux-sxs.org