Configuring cronie for mailing output [solved]

Question

Hi,
I am having a hard time setting up cronie for mailing output. Jump to the last sentence for the actual question.
From man 8 cron, I read that the -m option "allows you to specify a shell command to use for sending Cron mail output instead of using sendmail(8). This command must accept a fully formatted mail message (with headers) on standard input and send it as a mail message to the recipients specified in the mail headers". I do have msmtp installed. I can do this and receive email successfully:
$ msmtp -t << eof
> To: <my address>@gmail.com
>
> test
> eof
Thus I know that msmtp -t is the command I must provide with the -m option.
Then, I followed these instructions and created /etc/systemd/system/cronie.service.d/mailing.conf which contains:
[Service]
ExecStart=
ExecStart=/usr/bin/crond -n -m 'msmtp -t'
Note: the first, empty ExecStart cancels the former one from the original .service file.
After starting cronie.service, this is the result of systemctl status cronie.service:
cronie.service - Periodic Command Scheduler
Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/system/cronie.service; enabled)
Drop-In: /etc/systemd/system/cronie.service.d
└─mailing.conf
Active: active (running) since Mon 2013-06-24 22:58:24 EDT; 2s ago
Main PID: 1457 (crond)
CGroup: name=systemd:/system/cronie.service
└─1457 /usr/bin/crond -n -m msmtp -t
Jun 24 22:58:24 electron systemd[1]: Started Periodic Command Scheduler.
Jun 24 22:58:24 electron crond[1457]: (CRON) INFO (Syslog will be used instead of sendmail.)
Jun 24 22:58:24 electron crond[1457]: (CRON) INFO (running with inotify support)
Jun 24 22:58:24 electron crond[1457]: (CRON) INFO (@reboot jobs will be run at computer's startup.)
It seems that systemd drops the single quotes and takes -t as it's own parameter instead of passing it to msmtp. You can also see that crond logged "Syslog will be used instead of sendmail". I can actually see the output of my commands in /var/log/crond.log. How should I quote the space between msmtp and -t in the ExecStart line of my .service file?
Last edited by a_neutrino (2013-06-30 21:54:53)

Answer 1

Hi,
Thanks a lot for your help. The issue is [solved].
dif wrote:You have to create a file /etc/aliases that holds the addresses where e-mail notifications will be sent to when a user's cronjob creates an output.
It seems unnecessary. The MAILTO variable set in the crontab accepts a complete email address.
dif wrote:Contrary to Wiki, there are no commas separating e-mail addresses if there are a few in a line.
The msmtp man page also says to put commas.
dif wrote:
There is a special script distributed with Arch that is able to scan /etc/aliases for a valid domain address and then calls msmtp. Here is its path
/usr/share/doc/msmtp/find_alias/find_alias_for_msmtp.sh
Copy it to /usr/bin/ and create a simlink:
sudo cp /usr/share/doc/msmtp/find_alias/find_alias_for_msmtp.sh /usr/bin/find_alias_for_msmtp.sh
sudo ln -s /usr/bin/find_alias_for_msmtp.sh /usr/bin/sendmail
Why didn't you just :
chmod +x /usr/share/doc/msmtp/find_alias/find_alias_for_msmtp.sh
ln -s /usr/share/doc/msmtp/find_alias/find_alias_for_msmtp.sh /usr/bin/sendmail
Also, I had to modify the find_alias_for_msmtp.sh script a little because cronie calls sendmail without any parameters:
diff --git a/scripts/find_alias/find_alias_for_msmtp.sh b/scripts/find_alias/find_alias_for_msmtp.sh
index fb485dd..346f313 100644
--- a/scripts/find_alias/find_alias_for_msmtp.sh
+++ b/scripts/find_alias/find_alias_for_msmtp.sh
@@ -16,15 +16,18 @@ MSMTP=`which msmtp || echo "/usr/local/bin/msmtp"`
if [ "$1" = '-i' ] ; then
v_recipient=$2 # mailx calls sendmail with -i as the 1st param and the recipient as the second param
-elif [ "$1" = '-t' ] ; then # most other programs call sendmail with a -t option
+elif [ "$1" = '-t' -o $# = 0 ] ; then
+ # Most other programs call sendmail with a -t option.
+ # cronie calls sendmail without parameters and
+ # expects sendmail to find the recipient in the mail headers.
v_to=`echo "$v_msg" | grep -m 1 'To: '`
v_recipient=${v_to:4:50}
else
- v_recipient=$1 # no parameter, sendmail was called with the recipient as parameter
+ v_recipient=$1 # sendmail was called with the recipient as parameter
fi
-if [ $v_recipient != 0 ] ; then
+if [ "$v_recipient" != 0 ] ; then
# trim spaces from recipient email address
v_recipient="${v_recipient// /}"
Or maybe I missed something. I submitted the patch upstream to see if they think it's relevant.
dif wrote:Hope this helps.
Yes, it did! Thank you so much.