Features/NoMTA

No MTA

Summary

Make the MTA (i.e. /usr/sbin/sendmail) optional.

Owner

• Name: Adam Miller

• email: maxamillion [AT] gmail.com

Current status

• Targeted release: Fedora 13
• Last updated: 23 March 2010
• Percentage of completion: 90%

Working:

• Everything as designed (Aside from messages that would normally be sent via a MTA)

Done:

• Patch cronie to redirect messages that would be sent to a MTA to syslog in the event a MTA is not present.
  • Patch submitted in RHBZ #548843, applied to cronie-1.4.4, currently in F13.
• Add sendmail to comps to ensure it is still installed by default, as expected
  • sendmail is listed in the base group.
  • This is for compatibility purposes and should be removed in a future release

TODO:

• Add comment to /etc/sysconfig/crond that shows how to use syslog instead of sendmail:

# To send cron output to syslog instead of local mail, set CRONDARGS to:
#CRONDARGS="-s -m off"

• Remove cronie's hard requirement on /usr/sbin/sendmail
• Patch the default configuration for logwatch to not send mail, but to send messages to stdout and then verify the patch to cronie is reporting logwatch messages to syslog accordingly.
• Verify there are no other packages that will require a patch to function without a MTA

Detailed Description

The presence of a Mail Transfer Agent (MTA) like sendmail has long been the de facto standard. But most systems that aren't mail servers do not specifically need to keep local mail queues or transfer mail to other systems. For the vast majority of users this is simply wasted resources and wasted disk space for the packages installed.

cron is the only thing in a default Fedora install that still uses local mail to report its status. The cron syslog facility exists for this purpose, and our current cron setup already uses it to log some messages to /var/log/cron.

This feature allows cron to optionally use syslog instead of email to report job status, thus making the presence of an MTA completely optional.

Benefit to Fedora

One less required package in the critical path, and we clear the way for removing the MTA from the default install.

Scope

Packages that may require changes:

• cronie - RHBZ #472710
• crontabs
• logwatch

cronie

cronie is the only package in a default Fedora install that requests the use of an MTA. If /usr/sbin/sendmail is not present, it will simply stop sending mail. Therefore, if we modify cronie to send job output to a log file, we can remove the requirement for an MTA with no loss of functionality.

Required changes:

1. Modify cronie to send job output to the cron syslog facility if sendmail is missing
2. Remove Requires: /usr/sbin/sendmail from cronie's spec file

crontabs

crontabs need to be examined to be sure none of them depend on local mail being sent.

logwatch

logwatch needs to be examine to see if it actually depends on cron sending email, and patched to use stdout/syslog if so.

How To Test

1. Ensure you have cronie-1.4.4-1.fc13 or higher installed.
2. Edit /etc/sysconfig/crond and set CRONDARGS="-s -m off"
3. service crond restart
4. yum remove sendmail (or whichever package is providing your /usr/sbin/sendmail)
   • This step won't work yet - cronie-1.4.4-1.fc13 still requires /usr/sbin/sendmail. Skip it for now.
5. Verify that all output from cron jobs shows up in /var/log/cron

User Experience

Transparent to most users. System administrators or integrators who were relying on the implicit dependency on /usr/bin/sendmail may need to update their kickstart files etc. to explicitly install their chosen MTA.

Dependencies

none

Contingency Plan

Do Nothing.

Documentation

• None

Release Notes

• None

Comments and Discussion

• See Talk:Features/NoMTA