daily/weekly/monthly periodic output

[Jeremy Chadwick]

On Thu, Oct 09, 2008 at 10:52:14AM -0400, Corey Dulecki wrote:
> I have FreeBSD 6.2 running on IBM hardware, single CPU.  This server  
> does not have sendmail enabled at all, i.e., in /etc/rc.conf, all four  
> of the "sendmail_xxx" enablers are set to "NO".  Today, the /var  
> filesystem ran out of inodes.
>
> I tracked the issue down to files that keep appearing in  
> /var/spool/clientmqueue.

Which makes no sense, since you're using postfix -- postfix does not use
that directory.  It sounds to me like possibly your
/etc/mail/mailer.conf (used by mailwrapper) is still pointing to the
Sendmail (non-postfix) binaries.

> I've researched enough to understand that  
> these files represent emails that cannot be sent, presumably because I  
> do not have a mail server running on the system.  I do not want to  
> enable sendmail or any other client; what I want to do is have the  
> processes which generate these emails send their information to a log,  
> which I will check manually.  I believe these emails are being generated  
> by the daily/weekly/monthly periodic processes, something that I didn't  
> even know existed until I ran out of inodes.
>
> My question is this:  How can I make it so that these periodic processes  
> simply log their messages instead of sending emails that get stuck in  
> clientmqueue?  Alternatively, if I can't do that, how do I simply turn  
> off these emails entirely so that they are not sent?

You should be using these values in rc.conf:

# We use postfix
postfix_enable="yes"
sendmail_enable="NO"
sendmail_submit_enable="NO"
sendmail_outbound_enable="NO"
sendmail_msp_queue_enable="NO"

And these values in periodic.conf:

# We use postfix
daily_clean_hoststat_enable="NO"
daily_status_mail_rejects_enable="NO"
daily_status_include_submit_mailq="NO"
daily_submit_queuerun="NO"

And these values in /etc/mail/mailer.conf:

sendmail	/usr/local/sbin/sendmail
send-mail	/usr/local/sbin/sendmail
mailq		/usr/local/sbin/sendmail
newaliases	/usr/local/sbin/sendmail

If you *really* want to turn off daily/weekly/monthly mails -- which I
strongly DO NOT recommend you do, for MANY reasons -- you should look at
/etc/defaults/periodic.conf for all of the values you can tune.  DO NOT
edit that file -- use /etc/periodic.conf instead.

-- 
| Jeremy Chadwick                                jdc at parodius.com |
| Parodius Networking                       http://www.parodius.com/ |
| UNIX Systems Administrator                  Mountain View, CA, USA |
| Making life hard for others since 1977.              PGP: 4BD6C0CB |