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

[Stephen John Smoogen]

On Sun, Oct 19, 2008 at 7:47 PM, seth vidal <skvidal at fedoraproject.org> wrote:
> On Sun, 2008-10-19 at 15:32 -0400, Colin Walters wrote:
>>  But it doesn't make
>> sense for the default desktop OS to be sending you email about all the
>> junk going on under the hood.
>
>
> I understand where you are coming from but I have to say the above
> statement is, imo, fundamentally wrong.
>

I am in mixed boat about this... trying to go through 100+ logwatches
every day is a headache as it is :). But knowing that there is a
failed cron job on some desktop because the rootkit was b0rked is
valuable... but I am not the average user.

So the first question that comes to mind.. is if the user doesn't know
that the email is being generated.. does it matter it exists? And what
environments are we dealing with?

1) Home use. Does Grandma want to know about logwatch or noisy cron
jobs? Does she even know that there is email in the root user mailbox
since she shouldn't ever log into it?

2) Small scale environment. (2-30 systems).
3) Medium environment (30-100) systems.
4) Large environment 100-1000 systems
5) Ginormouse 1000+ systems.

Each has its use case. When you get to the large to ginormous ones..
you really need to work on the tools for centralized logging, with
agents and things to track usage.

The small to medium are the ones which are probably the ones that need
more work. The Small one might have someone who knows to look at the
root mail spool but most of the time its going to be someone who has
his worn "Linux for Dummies" book from the last person who set up the
lab.

Email only makes sense for this person if
a) its easy to setup.
b) it gives useful information.
c) and they know what to do with it.

It really doesn't matter if a box has postfix, exim, ssmtp, smail, etc
if the email is just stuck on the local machine and the user has no
idea where it is, how to get it, or what it does. And in that case,
does generating the email in the first place help anything? If this
were some new service versus one that we system administrators have
been raised to think as a god-given right.. and we were looking at
adding it to the desktop environment would we? [I am talking about the
default state where email stays local, and the local user probably has
no idea its there.]

-- 
Stephen J Smoogen. -- BSD/GNU/Linux
How far that little candle throws his beams! So shines a good deed
in a naughty world. = Shakespeare. "The Merchant of Venice"