On Sun, Oct 19, 2008 at 7:47 PM, seth vidal <skvidal@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On Sun, 2008-10-19 at 15:32 -0400, Colin Walters wrote: >> But it doesn't make >> sense for the default desktop OS to be sending you email about all the >> junk going on under the hood. > > > I understand where you are coming from but I have to say the above > statement is, imo, fundamentally wrong. > I am in mixed boat about this... trying to go through 100+ logwatches every day is a headache as it is :). But knowing that there is a failed cron job on some desktop because the rootkit was b0rked is valuable... but I am not the average user. So the first question that comes to mind.. is if the user doesn't know that the email is being generated.. does it matter it exists? And what environments are we dealing with? 1) Home use. Does Grandma want to know about logwatch or noisy cron jobs? Does she even know that there is email in the root user mailbox since she shouldn't ever log into it? 2) Small scale environment. (2-30 systems). 3) Medium environment (30-100) systems. 4) Large environment 100-1000 systems 5) Ginormouse 1000+ systems. Each has its use case. When you get to the large to ginormous ones.. you really need to work on the tools for centralized logging, with agents and things to track usage. The small to medium are the ones which are probably the ones that need more work. The Small one might have someone who knows to look at the root mail spool but most of the time its going to be someone who has his worn "Linux for Dummies" book from the last person who set up the lab. Email only makes sense for this person if a) its easy to setup. b) it gives useful information. c) and they know what to do with it. It really doesn't matter if a box has postfix, exim, ssmtp, smail, etc if the email is just stuck on the local machine and the user has no idea where it is, how to get it, or what it does. And in that case, does generating the email in the first place help anything? If this were some new service versus one that we system administrators have been raised to think as a god-given right.. and we were looking at adding it to the desktop environment would we? [I am talking about the default state where email stays local, and the local user probably has no idea its there.] -- Stephen J Smoogen. -- BSD/GNU/Linux How far that little candle throws his beams! So shines a good deed in a naughty world. = Shakespeare. "The Merchant of Venice" -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
