TEST email is working perfect but not receiving daily mails

[benamira]

I have been googling forum but i can not find the solution.
My configuration looks good and the test email works perfect but i am not receiving daily mails. Don't know how to enable, it is supposed to be enabled by default, but zero emails so far from freenas.
Am i missing something obvious??


FreeNAS 9.2 RC

 

[cyberjock]

Did you setup the root email address?

 

[benamira]

Yes sure. In fact Test email is received seconds later in this email assigned to root.

 

[cyberjock]

Hmm... I don't know. I'll have to check this out.

 

[dlavigne]

This sounds like a bug which should be reported at bugs.freenas.org. Please post the issue number here when the bug is created.

 

[William Grzybowski]

Daily emails have been changed in 9.2 RC, now you'll only receive emails when there is an actual problem.

 

[cyberjock]

Daily emails have been changed in 9.2 RC, now you'll only receive emails when there is an actual problem.

Wow. That's disappointing. I preferred the daily emails because it told me that my server was still up and able to email me properly. If I didn't get an email for a day or two I'd be asking what was wrong.

 

[jkh]

Wow. That's disappointing. I preferred the daily emails because it told me that my server was still up and able to email me properly. If I didn't get an email for a day or two I'd be asking what was wrong.

Well, you could always deliberately introduce a problem with your system so that it complains at you every day, I suppose. :)

The arguments others made was that by getting repeatedly spammed by their FreeNAS boxes, they were starting to ignore the emails and this was worse than just being told when something was wrong. Since it's always been the Unix philosophy that "no news is good news" as far as error reporting is concerned, this made sense to me so we made the reporting system shut up by default. I think from the perspective of "email fatigue", this is likely to produce better results in terms of knowing that something is wrong when you get an email vs having to scan the daily emails carefully, every single day, just in case. Most humans just don't work that way. I know, I know, you're not human, but we have to target the primary demographic here. ;)

I think having your box email you every day is probably an easy enough thing to set up in cron! You can even have it say "Hi, cyberjock! I still love you!"

 

[budmannxx]

I see both sides of this. I've seen this dealt with via different email subjects for "success" and "error" runs. When you get a success email, you know your system is up and running; when you get an error email, you know you have to take a deeper look. Maybe just adding "ERROR:" to the beginning of the email subject, or something like that?

 

[cyberjock]

I actually did write a cronjob that DOES email me every night. It gives me the output of about 20 commands so I can get a complete summary of my server at a glance(of about 50 pages). I was considering disabling it recently. However, now that I know 9.2.0 doesn't email like it used to I will definitely be keeping it.

I will agree with the email fatigue. But, it's something that I deal with by recognizing that email fatigue IS a big mistake and forcing myself to look at the important sections(oh.. gee.. the first 3 sections for my custom cronjob). So it really takes me about 20 seconds to see my server's status. :)

The biggest problem I'm expecting is going to be those people that change their email password and forget to change it in FreeNAS. How many businesses make you change it every 3 months or less? So you change your password not realizing that you've just disabled FreeNAS emails. Months go by and you don't even know that you can't receive emails anymore(it did work last time you tested it, right?). Next thing you know you have 3 failed disks in your RAIDZ2 pool and you are asking for forgiveness from the ZFS gods.

The whole email thing is a dangerous game to play as emails ARE your warning of problems. If those get borked in any way the consequences can be disasterous. Probably 75%+ of our users that lose their pools did not setup emails at all and a small handful made a password change to their email account and forgot to update FreeNAS(some have showed up asking why the emails stopped suddenly, then realized they changed their password in accordance with their company policy). For everyone else months/years later it bit them. When asked about it they said "well, we thought FreeNAS would warn us of impending doom". When asked how FreeNAS would do that, they say "I dunno... an email or something". And then when you ask them if they setup emails they go "Err.. What?" In this day and age where gmail could change their security requirements without notice(such as suddenly requiring SSL) you might be very unhappy if you didn't get "that memo". I'm all about "Human Factors" engineering and using "Human Performance tools" between you and the server to ensure everything is working fine. I'd just prefer to get the emails and if I want to be dumb enough to delete them without reading that's MY problem. :)

 

[Dusan]

Only the daily everything-is-ok periodic mails are suppressed. You will still receive cron e-mails, so if you enabled scrubs you will get those e-mails (that's every two weeks with your recommended settings.)
Oh, you will also receive that monthly email nagging you to enable bsdstat. I'd like to remove that one too (it's disabled it in my setup), but some people would actually want to enable bsdstat: https://bugs.freenas.org/issues/3548

 

[cyberjock]

I have cron emails suppressed themselves. But my script creates a text file and then emails it to me via the mail command nightly. It has "some" amount of brains in that it will change the subject line of the email if a few simple things indicative of a failing drive occur. It's far from all-inclusive though.

 

[cmfisher4]

Not having any experience what-so-ever with programming, wouldn't it be possible to provide the option to the user on whether or not he wants daily emails? Default it to NO if that's how you want the "base" install to go, but provide the user the option, via the dashboard, to enable it.
I like the idea of cyberjocks "custom" email, but I barely know what I cron is vice how to write one (just not something I've look at yet). I'm still studying and don't have my system built yet, but I'm close (TD has 3TB WD reds with a $30 rebate so I think I'm finally going to pull the $500 storage trigger tonight for 4 of them) and I think knowlegeable enough to safely admin a system. In the meantime, it would be nice to have the potential safety net of an email even if the vast majority of them would only really amount to "hi, chris. I stil love you!" ;)
And, yes, I will be building with 9.1.2 anyway (or whatever the stable release is).

 

[Yatti420]

I noticed this in 9.2 .. You can always amend periodic.conf to return to daily emails regardless of status..

 

[fracai]

I for one welcome our email-less overlords. I'd like to set this up for my jails as well. Prior to setting up email in one jail, I didn't receive any jail mail (hah), and would like to disable the daily "OK" messages in the jail as well. What change needs to be performed in order to make this switch? Yatti420 indicates it's in periodic.conf; what's the value that needs to change?

Something like this? http://serverfault.com/questions/27...s-too-noisy-how-can-i-control-the-noise-level

 

[Dusan]

Something like this? http://serverfault.com/questions/27...s-too-noisy-how-can-i-control-the-noise-level

Yes. This is what I use in 9.1.1: [ HOW TO ] Manage Automatic Daily Email Reports. Depending on what is enabled by default in a jail you may want to customize the settings a bit further. Running some scripts in a jail makes no sense (e.g. kernel messages).

 

[fracai]

Excellent. Thanks.

 

[Varun Chandak]

I actually did write a cronjob that DOES email me every night. It gives me the output of about 20 commands so I can get a complete summary of my server at a glance(of about 50 pages). I was considering disabling it recently. However, now that I know 9.2.0 doesn't email like it used to I will definitely be keeping it.

I will agree with the email fatigue. But, it's something that I deal with by recognizing that email fatigue IS a big mistake and forcing myself to look at the important sections(oh.. gee.. the first 3 sections for my custom cronjob). So it really takes me about 20 seconds to see my server's status. :)

The biggest problem I'm expecting is going to be those people that change their email password and forget to change it in FreeNAS. How many businesses make you change it every 3 months or less? So you change your password not realizing that you've just disabled FreeNAS emails. Months go by and you don't even know that you can't receive emails anymore(it did work last time you tested it, right?). Next thing you know you have 3 failed disks in your RAIDZ2 pool and you are asking for forgiveness from the ZFS gods.

The whole email thing is a dangerous game to play as emails ARE your warning of problems. If those get borked in any way the consequences can be disasterous. Probably 75%+ of our users that lose their pools did not setup emails at all and a small handful made a password change to their email account and forgot to update FreeNAS(some have showed up asking why the emails stopped suddenly, then realized they changed their password in accordance with their company policy). For everyone else months/years later it bit them. When asked about it they said "well, we thought FreeNAS would warn us of impending doom". When asked how FreeNAS would do that, they say "I dunno... an email or something". And then when you ask them if they setup emails they go "Err.. What?" In this day and age where gmail could change their security requirements without notice(such as suddenly requiring SSL) you might be very unhappy if you didn't get "that memo". I'm all about "Human Factors" engineering and using "Human Performance tools" between you and the server to ensure everything is working fine. I'd just prefer to get the emails and if I want to be dumb enough to delete them without reading that's MY problem. :)

Hi.. can you share your cron script with us so that we can look those 20 commands you are referring to.

 

[cyberjock]

It's in the how-to section of the forums. ;)