Hi Andrew,

> On Tue, 9 Dec 2008, Michael Mansour wrote:
> 
> > Hi,
> >
> > I'm currently in the process of starting to rationalise the amount of emails
> > generated from servers.
> >
> > Currently, there are plenty of processes cron'ed from each server that
> > generates multiple daily emails (Logwatch, etc) when processes are run.
> >
> > I'm thinking of configuring and scripting the servers to generate their
> > nightly outputs to a file or directory, and then appending those outputs to a
> > formatted web page so I can just check one web page each morning instead of
> > receiving hundreds of emails per cron job.
> 
> A hundred emails or a single giant web page ?
> Not clear that one is much better than the other.

IMHO the long web page is much better. 

Going through, say, 200 emails in a Webmail client (usually taking a 5-10
seconds to click the delete/trash button) typically takes anywhere from 45mins
to an hour for me. I have to read many of the emails too so it doesn't take
5-10 seconds most of the time.

Having all that on one web page, well, it could take me 10 minutes to go
through the web page, still better than what I'm doing now.

> If you ran a syslog server, all the logs could be in once place
> so logwatch could summarize across machines.
> It does, however, put your logs at the mercy of the network :-(

Yes I thought of this too, and have two central syslog servers which log into
MySQL, but it still really wouldn't solve my problem as many of those emails
won't properly fit into a syslog entry.

> > Before I do this I was wondering how others handle this with their servers?
> 
> I'm afraid I just wade through the emails,
> or choose which to ignore today.

:) what I've done in the mean time is setup a web Ticketing system and
re-routed all those email to "root" etc to the ticketing system, which gets
them out of my Inbox and easier to manage in a DB.

I'm still looking for a better solution though, as hundreds of "cases" are now
raised each day in the Ticketing system which is easier to manage and delete
from, but still not ideal.

Regards,

Michael.

> -- 
> Dr. Andrew C. Aitchison		Computer Officer, DPMMS, Cambridge
> [log in to unmask]	http://www.dpmms.cam.ac.uk/~werdna
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