Re: question about sending mail and postfix - slightly OT question

On Tuesday 19 January 2010 04:54:57 Adam Hardy wrote:
Paul E Condon on 19/01/10 06:14, wrote:
On 20100118_133220, Adam Hardy wrote:
I have a new server online with lenny that I want to configure to
send all its mail for root to my email address, and that's all. I
don't want it to receive any email or relay or anything else.

I am running into the problem that the mail
command isn't installed. It obviously doesn't come with postfix and
there appears to be a huge choice of packages that I could choose
from in the debian repositories, but isn't there a default?

I don't think the end-user mail command is installed by default. A fairly
stripped-down Lenny would still include a sendmail work-alike, usually exim4-
daemon-light.

On my system, I am getting the mail command from the bsd-mailx package:
bss@rei:/etc/alternatives% ls -l $(which mail)
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 22 2009-02-15 17:41 /usr/bin/mail ->
/etc/alternatives/mail
bss@rei:/etc/alternatives% ls -l /etc/alternatives/mail
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 18 2009-02-15 17:41 /etc/alternatives/mail ->
/usr/bin/bsd-mailx
bss@rei:/etc/alternatives% ls -l /usr/bin/bsd-mailx
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 91192 2008-04-27 12:20 /usr/bin/bsd-mailx
bss@rei:/etc/alternatives% dpkg -S /usr/bin/bsd-mailx
bsd-mailx: /usr/bin/bsd-mailx

The "mail" utility has been marked as "LEGACY" in the UNIX standards for over
a decade. The documentation of the legacy command indicates that
"Applications should migrate to the mailx utility". IMO, Users should
probably migrate to a better local mail agent, mutt is a start, but you should
look at the packages to provide the "mail-reader" virtual. Also, there's a
"mailx" package in Lenny, but it is also provided by 3 other packages. One of
those is bsd-mailx, but the others might be just as capable.

Lenny netinstall puts exim4 on the computer as part of the base
system. Why are you trying to get postfix working? You should have
exim4 from your first boot of Lenny. Did you try exim4 and find it
wanting?

I'm configuring a new vserver online with a hosting provider, and they
installed the bare minimum lenny with ssh, and that obviously didn't
include exim.

Are you *sure*? It's hard to get a Debian installation going without some
package that provides the virtual "mail-transport-agent", since cron needs it
and cron is Priority: important in Debian. For most packages the default
"mail-transport-agent" is exim4-daemon-light.

I have no experience with exim, and although I had only very
little experience with postfix, I did have some before I started and now
I've got several hours of mucking around with postfix as investment in it.

As both have similar security records and feature lists, you should probably
use postfix anyway. Experience and patience counts for a lot in mail server
configuration.

Postfix is usually only one command away from being installed: (aptitude
install postfix). Since postfix Conflicts with mail-transport-agent other
packages that provide that virtual (e.g. exim) would be uninstalled.
--
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bss@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx ((_/)o o(\_))
ICQ: 514984 YM/AIM: DaTwinkDaddy `-'(. .)`-'
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