On Fri, Oct 03, 2003 at 11:22:45AM -0400, M3 Freak wrote: > Amanda is using "mail", and it works fine (just sent a test message > using "mail"). Here's what I got when I typed in what you suggested: > > UNCOMPRESS_PATH="/usr/bin/gzip" MAILER="/usr/bin/Mail"
Note that sometimes "mail" and "Mail" are *not* (symlinks to) the same program, so don't assume that they behave identically. <history> At some point in the distant past (at Berkeley, I believe), someone came up with a spiffy new mail client (which we'd now consider as awesome as, say, a 486 :-) For backward compatibility, they couldn't call it "mail", since that was the name of the old(er), ugly(er) client. Instead they picked a stupid name, "Mail", and for compatibility with *them*, we've had to live with that ever since (though Mail is sometimes known as "mailx" instead.) </history> > 02 4 * * * root run-parts /etc/cron.daily > [...] > Should I create a new file called, for example, > "amanda.cron" under "/etc/cron.daily" instead of placing the cron entry > for amanda in "/etc/crontab"? NO! Or rather, only if you want your amdump and amcheck to run: - as root -- which you don't, since they want to run as the amanda user (i.e. the value you gave for the --with-user= option to configure). And for security reasons, that user should *not* be root! - at 4:20 AM, which is quite possibly too late for amdump, and is almost certainly too late for "amcheck -m" :-) Either make separate entries in /etc/crontab, or use "crontab -e" to create a crontab for the amanda user. As far as I can tell, the two methods are identical. (The only difference is that the user themselves can use "crontab -e", but only root can edit /etc/crontab. For the amanda user, that's probably irrelevent.) On Fri, Oct 03, 2003 at 12:29:06PM -0400, Jon LaBadie wrote: > On Fri, Oct 03, 2003 at 11:22:45AM -0400, M3 Freak wrote: > > [in crontab] > > MAILTO=root > > The parameter in the amanda.conf file "mailto" (lowercase) is > set correctly isn't it? > > But the uppercase form does appear in the source code. I don't know > if it might pick this up from the environment. Doesn't look that way. The only place MAILTO occurs (in the 2.4.4 source tree) is in server-src/conffile.c, where it's (a) an enum constant, and (b) a string that's used to (case-insensitively) match tokens from amanda.conf. I think that the MAILTO environment variable is a red herring. However, it might be useful in tracking down the real problem. What MAILTO in a crontab does is to tell cron where to email the program's stdout and stderr, if there is any -- but of course there isn't from "amcheck -m", since that mails its report instead. But what if amcheck is dying before it sends the email? Like, because it's being run as root instead of the amanda user perhaps... Try removing the "-m", and setting MAILTO properly in the crontab, if it isn't already. Then "amcheck" will write its report to stdout, and cron will mail you the results. That way, if amcheck is aborting early, you'll see the messages. Also check the mail logs, as others have suggested; and the cron logs too (they're in /var/log, or /var/cron, or /var/spool/cron, or somewhere like that). Either of those might tell you something useful. -- | | /\ |-_|/ > Eric Siegerman, Toronto, Ont. [EMAIL PROTECTED] | | / When I came back around from the dark side, there in front of me would be the landing area where the crew was, and the Earth, all in the view of my window. I couldn't help but think that there in front of me was all of humanity, except me. - Michael Collins, Apollo 11 Command Module Pilot