[ILUG] Debian crontab

[Brian O'Mahony]

Right. Im a bit screwed here then.

Firstly - its debian, not ubuntu, but that's probably moot.

I set the server up Wed 23. The user I created was bomhony. Set up the crontabs etc.

I then changed the passwd file to a copy of the server this will eventually be replacing. This meant that my account, bomahony was changed. When I now looked in the /var/mail folder, the bomahony file was there, but the permissions were billy:mail. Billy is account uid 1000. So then I went and tried to send a mail from bomahony to root, and got Cc: exim: failed to find gid for group name "Debian-exim".

So Debian-exim user and group were missing from the passwd and group files (as these had been copied).

So now once that's fixed, when I send mail from bomahony to root, it gets sent to bomahony.....

So basically, the mail is now working, but I would rather it went to the root address. Any ideas where to change this?

B

-----Original Message-----
From: Gareth Eason [mailto:bigbro at skynet.ie]
Sent: 06 August 2008 11:31
To: Brian O'Mahony
Cc: iLug Users Group
Subject: Re: [ILUG] Debian crontab

Brian O'Mahony wrote:
> I have a number of redhat and debian servers here. We sysc things between offices using the rsync command via cron jobs.
>
> When instigated from the redhat boxes (3,4,4u6) it sends a mail to the user (root in all cases) and tells what went on.
>
> When instigated from debian, it doesn't send any mails to the user. I imagine this is to do with crontab, but cant figure out where the issue is. I am however only doing this on one debian box. I have two others, but id rather not go messing with sync's while they are live....
>
> Any ideas?
[snip]

        if there's output, cron will always (within certain tolerances) send an
e-mail. RedHat tends to have a more mature e-mail setup by default, likely
ensuring that e-mails are being sent onwards and thus are being seen by you.

        Have a look at your mail config for the local MTA of the Ubuntu boxes in
question. It sends root mail to the first user created, IIRC, but that could
be spooling in the user's local /var/spool/mail directory, rather than being
forwarded to where you expect to receive them.

        Hope this helps.

        Best regards,
        -->Gar


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