Forward Root's mail to an external address

Has anyone managed to get this to work?

My Dockstar is running beautifully so far. Debian is installed and purring on a USB key, while two 1.5TB drives in external USB docks are automounted at boot time and serving files via Samba.

However, I'd like for the smartmontool daemon to notify me via email if there is a problem with one of the big boy drives. Additionally, anything sent to root I'd like forwarded to that same email address. I've tried multiple configuration schemes, but absolutely nothing is working. Aliases, .forward files, postfix configs... I'm at a loss.

It depends on which Mail Transfer Agent (MTA) you are using. With sendmail, you should be able to do this by adding an entry such as

root: external@address.com

to the /etc/mail/aliases file

For Postfix Users: Create the file ~/.forward with your e-mail adress as content :-)


Regards,
Christian

i have it working on mine. it's sending rsync daily logs to my external email so i can keep tabs on things.

took a while to figure it out, but once i figured it out, it was really easy. I'm using webmin, but this doesn't require webmin.

here's what i did:

installed postfix

installed mailutils

edited (via webmin, but you can do it from anything) my /etc/postfix/main.cf file to include a line for my external smtp server (i'm on cox):

relayhost = smtp.east.cox.net

once you do that and restart postfix, you should be able to mail from the command line. test it. if it works, go to the next step, which is to pipe out your mail:

cat /home/toliver/rlog.txt | mail -s "BU Results" youremailaddress@gmail.com

if this works, then add that line (or something similar) to your cron file. here's the important parts to my /var/spool/cron/crontabs/root file, edited for personal content:

# DO NOT EDIT THIS FILE - edit the master and reinstall.
# (/tmp/crontab.Xoicmf/crontab installed on Sat Jan 22 19:28:08 2011)
# (Cron version -- $Id: crontab.c,v 2.13 1994/01/17 03:20:37 vixie Exp $)
1 8 * * * /usr/bin/rsync -av --log-file=/home/toliver/rlog.txt --temp-dir=/media/harddrive98/tmp --port=55555  --delete /media/harddrive45/ /media/harddrive$
0 13 * * * cat /home/toliver/rlog.txt | mail -s "BU Results" myemailaddress@gmail.com     #backup results
0 7 * * * rm /home/toliver/rlog.txt  #kill it

what this does is run the rysnc job, creates a log of the job, emails daily versions of the log, deletes the log, and then starts the whole thing over again.

i don't know if this is the best way to do it, but it works for me!

Cheers.