[j-nsp] email from commit or op script?

[Richard A Steenbergen]

On Tue, Feb 16, 2010 at 11:57:19AM -0500, Phil Shafer wrote:
> Bill Marquette writes:
> >Is there any way to send email from an op script?
> 
> No, sorry.  We do snmp, syslog, or transfer, but not email.  My
> thoughts were always that email notifications should be done at
> a central server to avoid floods.  But this is an increasingly
> common feature request.

I've never understood the aversion some people have to a router sending
e-mail. It is a proven mechanism for reliable message delivery, with
many robust software implementations and tools freely available, so why
bother reinventing the wheel? Mechanisms like SNMP and syslog aren't
exactly simple to work with, and they aren't reliable (you can have
undetected udp packet drops). FTP upload doesn't come with any software
mechanisms to detect the new data and act upon it immediately, etc.

If you really stop and think about it, email is the perfect choice for
event notification both from router-generated events and op scripts.
Even the client implementation is pretty darn simple compared to all the
fancy modern protocols people love to churn out, just a simple ssmtp
style tcp session to port 25 to hand off the data to a real mail server. 
Nobody said you had to run sendmail on the router or run dumps of your
router configs through gmail, a simple internal mailserver may be a
perfectly secure and functional solution for most people. I for one
would love to have an email notification option on my routers.

-- 
Richard A Steenbergen <ras at e-gerbil.net>       http://www.e-gerbil.net/ras
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