[Spacewalk-list] Necessity of Mail Server Running on Spacewalk Server?

[Wojtak, Greg (Superfly)]

I ran into an issue yesterday that had me stumped for quite a while.  I provisioned a new host and was trying to run rhn-profile-sync afterwards.  The software profile update went through fine but the hardware profile sync kept failing with a 500 error.  I looked in the httpd logs on the spacewalk server and spent about a half hour deciphering the traceback only to realize the traceback was being generated when doing a mail call.  It turns out that postfix on my spacewalk server had stopped (I think I did that intentionally and then forgot to start it up).

I guess I just wanted to find out, should a hardware sync really rely on mail being available?  It's probably trivial, but if a traceback/500 response is not intended I could see that as something that could really trip someone up.