[ILUG] Debian crontab

[Gareth Eason]

Brian O'Mahony wrote:
> 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?
[snip]

	Typically, you might want to set up an alias is /etc/aliases  (and run the
newaliases command once you've saved the file.) I typically have, on Debian
and Ubuntu servers, something like the following in my /etc/aliases file:
---------- 8< ----------
root: eason
postmaster: eason
eason: gareth.eason at my.real.address.com
---------- >8 ----------

	This is only one of many places to change mail routing on a UNIX system,
depending on how your mail system is set up. Since this is a rather common
requirement when setting up machines, I suggest you pick a single place for
configuring mail routing (e.g. /etc/aliases file) and configure it
consistently across all your servers. Otherwise it becomes a pain to try and
remember where root's mail is configured on a server later on.

	Best regards,
	-->Gar