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

[Les Mikesell]

Arjan van de Ven wrote:
> On Tue, 21 Oct 2008 08:52:27 -0500
> Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>>> I'm pretty solidly of the opinion that email is nowhere near being
>>> the most sensible way to get important information to a typical
>>> desktop user. If a failure is important then the user needs to know
>>> about it as soon as possible - mail provides no guarantees about
>>> timely delivery. We have plenty of desktop infrastructure to give
>>> important alerts to users, we're just failing to do so.
>> If local delivery of mail fails, there's no reason to think any other 
>> notification method would have succeeded. 
> 
> local mail is rather taxing on a system. 

Which is why mail is a sensible delivery mechanism.  It already knows 
how to deliver elsewhere if you want.

> If a harddisk is marginal for
> example... a mail delivery will cause the entire pagecache to be
> written to the disk, and guess what... the MTA will get stuck on that.

Which is why it is important to get the warning messages from smartctl 
and the disk space check _before_ you are toast.  Face it - nothing is 
going to save you after the disk fries or is completely out of space.

> And that assumes that the local user even reads "root" email.

That's the piece that needs to be fixed.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com