None of the Above (was Re: Sendmail still default?)

[chasd]

For informational purposes, not meant as more fuel for any kind of  
fire or as any kind of suggested solution . . .

On Oct 20, 2008, Phil Knirsch wrote:

> What happens to emails generated on a Max OSX via crontab or any  
> other automated system?

Apple uses launchd for that.
The daily and weekly cleanups are run at 03:15, the monthly at 05:30.
Since many people turn off or sleep their systems, these rarely get  
run on most Macs.
There are usually flame wars on Mac lists about how important these  
are to run manually if your usage patterns don't kick them off  
automatically.

It calls /usr/sbin/periodic with config files in /etc/periodic
The man page for periodic has "BSD System Manager's Manual" at the top.
Of the few BSD machines I have had to admin, I've never run across  
"periodic" - it was a new one on me.

> Does it run sendmail or some equivalent of it?

There is an /etc/postfix directory with an alias file that contains :

# Person who should get root's mail. Don't receive mail as root!
#root:          you

postfix isn't used AFAIK, and definitely not used for user notification.
I never see it in the Activity Monitor or with ps

> Just curious how they solve it as on a Mac i'd bet you that hardly  
> any typical user will know what root is.

There is no root as most know it on OS X.
The GUI uses a UAC kind of thing to promote privileges, and you can  
use sudo on the CLI.  To have either work your account needs to be in  
the wheel group. You get in the wheel group by checking a "administer  
this computer" type checkbox in System Preferences => Users.
Or you can use NetInfo on 10.0 through 10.4 if you prefer that or are  
an old NeXT admin ;)

OS X has a /Applications/Utilities/Console application that lets you  
sift through log files in a GUI.
A better solution IMHO than logwatch ( for a desktop user ). No daily  
"junk" as it has been called, but if you need to research an issue,  
the log files are easy to look at without "cat" or "less". The person  
looking still needs to know what they are looking at - raw log data  
not a filtered executive overview.

The SMART reporting is very poor. You have to manually run / 
Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility to see if there are problems  
reported by SMART ( no daemon ), and the report is binary, thumbs up  
or thumbs down without any detail. Usually by the time you check the  
SMART status, an experienced person has a good seat-of-the-pants  
hunch the hard drive is going south and uses Disk Utility for  
confirmation. I don't know if the desktop SMART notification floated  
earlier in this thread is currently implemented or if it was a  
proposal, but either way that it is far superior to e-mail  
notification, and does not exist on OS X ( or Windows that I know of ).


-- 
Charles Dostale