Cron spam
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I do not really mind having command line mailer - might be useful for other automation on the box…
I think, bigger issue is with cron jobs setup causing emails without easy way to change that behavior. -
The CLI mailer is /usr/local/bin/mail.php. Alas there's no way to pass sendmail path to arpwatch without patching and recompiling (Debian has one patch, probably others as well.) Sendmail is something that per developers will never make its way in; repeatedly stated.
For people here who still get spam even after uninstalling arpwatch, simply delete /usr/sbin/sendmail (that's what the package now does on uninstall).
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mail.php works differently than arpwatch expects, which is why I put sm.php in there to be a "sendmail work-alike" which is what it needs/wants.
The cron spam is not really caused by the presence of sm.php but by sloppy handling of cron jobs added by other packages that were unseen because the cron errors had nowhere to go without a mailer present. With sm.php linked as sendmail, cron could send e-mail like it wanted so it passed along errors when they popped up.
Fixing the various cron jobs in other packages to either send their output to /dev/null or to fix the errors reported in the body of the cron messages is the correct way to handle the problem, rather than hacking at arpwatch.
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Fixing the various cron jobs in other packages to either send their output to /dev/null or to fix the errors reported in the body of the cron messages is the correct way to handle the problem, rather than hacking at arpwatch.
Exactly! That is something I fully agree on.
I would still add a simple text box for MAILTO field, possibly in cron package - for easier control if bad packages persist :) -
rather than hacking at arpwatch.
The damned thing shouldn't have /usr/sbin/sendmail hardcoded in the first place (see the Debian patchset).
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It shouldn't – but that still doesn't solve the problem here (cron spam). It's only relevant to arpwatch. Even if arpwatch supported some other mail mechanism, should we decide to include this script in base as sendmail or if some other package uses it the crontab spam would still occur.
(Re)moving sendmail to alleviate cron spam doesn't fix anything, it only stops the notifications from letting the admin know that shit's broken. Fixing the broken shit is the cure.
