Stop all manner of periodic scripts from running

Steve Bertrand steve at ibctech.ca
Wed Mar 18 05:13:31 PDT 2009


Matthew Seaman wrote:
> Chuck Swiger wrote:
>> On Mar 17, 2009, at 5:09 PM, Steve Bertrand wrote:
>>> Although SMTP is denied, I just realized that there are numerous
>>> messages from periodic scripts that are queued up that can't be sent.
>>>
>>> Can someone advise how to find out each and every periodic script that
>>> tries to send out email (given a standard install), and/or how to
>>> disable this?
>>
>> Besides the answer to disable sendmail listening on localhost,
>> consider the following to /etc/periodic.conf:
>>
>> daily_clean_hoststat_enable="NO"
>> daily_status_mail_rejects_enable="NO"
>> daily_status_include_submit_mailq="NO"
>> daily_submit_queuerun="NO"
> 
> In answer to the principal question: just divert the periodic script
> output to a log file:
> 
> daily_output="/var/log/daily.log"
> daily_status_security_output="/var/log/daily.log"
> weekly_output="/var/log/weekly.log"
> monthly_output="/var/log/monthly.log"
> 
> You'll find those file names are already setup for appropriate log
> rotations in /etc/newsyslog.conf
> 
> In the default install, the only things that generate e-mail are the
> periodic cron jobs, so this change should be all that is necessary.  If
> you have set up your own cron jobs, then you'll have to be careful to
> redirect all output >/dev/null 2>&1  or else set a MAILTO variable in
> each crontab directing any output to an address that won't send mail
> outside the specific box.  Perhaps something aliased to /dev/null even.

Thanks to all who responded.

Not only do the methods do what I wanted, I also have quite a bit of
flexibility.

Cheers!

Steve


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