[ILUG] fetchmail cron job's

[Padraig Brady]

stee wrote:

>whats the best way to automate the following:
>
>I have a mailserver "tux" and a smoothwall box "firewall"
>now my family are expecting there mail to arrive from there eircom accounts
>to their computers and so I have a fetchmailrc script in each of their /home
>folders
>So my question is do I make a script to run all of these and how to I get
>smoothwall to automatically dialup and call this script or am I barking up
>the wrong tree all together??
>
>ps if this mail has any strange things about it can you tell me - I never
>got sendmail to work before so I'm a wee bit concerned that its alright
>
Possible I guess but not very flexible. You're probably better
running a mail server to connect & populate the users mail?
If you still want to do this I guess you could something like
the following from cron:

#get smoothwall to connect (perhaps by indirectly by doing simple tcp 
connect)?
for $dir in  /home/*/fetchmail.rc: do
    #cd $dir; fetchmail ...
done
#let smoothwall to disconnect automatically when no traffic,
#or explicitly by touching a file over nfs or something?

I'd definitely use a mail server which will be easier in the
long run IMHO.

Padraig.