Bug 548843

Summary: RFE: allow user to disable sendmail and send job output to syslog [PATCH]
Product: [Fedora] Fedora Reporter: Will Woods <wwoods>
Component: cronieAssignee: Marcela Mašláňová <mmaslano>
Status: CLOSED NEXTRELEASE QA Contact: Fedora Extras Quality Assurance <extras-qa>
Severity: medium Docs Contact:
Priority: low    
Version: rawhideCC: mmaslano, pbrobinson, pertusus, tmraz
Target Milestone: ---   
Target Release: ---   
Hardware: All   
OS: Linux   
Whiteboard:
Fixed In Version: cronie-1.4.4 Doc Type: Bug Fix
Doc Text:
Story Points: ---
Clone Of: Environment:
Last Closed: 2010-03-23 15:03:21 UTC Type: ---
Regression: --- Mount Type: ---
Documentation: --- CRM:
Verified Versions: Category: ---
oVirt Team: --- RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
Cloudforms Team: --- Target Upstream Version:
Embargoed:
Bug Depends On:    
Bug Blocks: 472710    
Attachments:
Description Flags
cronie-1.4.3-syslog-output.patch
none
cronie-1.4.3-sendmail-off.patch none

Description Will Woods 2009-12-18 19:28:28 UTC 
As part of the NoMTA feature (https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/NoMTA) we've discovered that cronie is the only package in a default Fedora install that requires sendmail.

cronie normally uses sendmail to mail output from cron jobs to the user who ran them. This requires sendmail to be installed on every system, and leaves the output in local mail queues, which is confusing for a lot of users.

cronie-1.4.3-syslog-output.patch adds a new "-s" flag to crond which makes it send all stdout/stderr from cron jobs to syslog, with the facility/priority of cron.info. The messages are prefixed with the PID of the job, like so:

Dec 18 14:06:01 metroid CROND[4272]: (root) CMD (/root/syslog-test.sh)
Dec 18 14:06:01 metroid CROND[4272]: syslog-test running - rm /var/run/syslog-test to re-run
Dec 18 14:06:01 metroid CROND[4272]: this is multiline output
[etc.]

cronie-1.4.3-sendmail-off.patch allows the string 'off' to be used with the existing -m flag to prevent cron from attempting to send output to sendmail; this avoids error messages like:
Dec 18 14:03:01 metroid CROND[4204]: (CRON) EXEC FAILED (/usr/sbin/sendmail): No such file or directory
Dec 18 14:03:01 metroid CROND[4200]: (root) MAIL (mailed 1319 bytes of output but got status 0x0001#012)

Both options are off by default, so these patches should not change the default behavior of crond.
Comment 1 Will Woods 2009-12-18 19:29:13 UTC 
Created attachment 379277 [details]
cronie-1.4.3-syslog-output.patch
Comment 2 Will Woods 2009-12-18 19:29:47 UTC 
Created attachment 379278 [details]
cronie-1.4.3-sendmail-off.patch
Comment 3 Marcela Mašláňová 2010-01-05 16:09:32 UTC 
These patches looks ok, but there is still problem with 'echoing' text into rsyslog. After every echo is print out incorrect text. This might be a problem of utf-8 in rsyslog.

Jan  5 17:04:01 caladan crond[4268]: (marca) RELOAD (/var/spool/cron/marca)
Jan  5 17:04:01 caladan CROND[4373]: (marca) CMD (touch /tmp/somefile)
Jan  5 17:04:01 caladan CROND[4374]: (marca) CMD (echo test)
Jan  5 17:04:01 caladan CROND[4374]: t�
Comment 4 Marcela Mašláňová 2010-01-08 09:54:31 UTC 
Testing srpm: http://mmaslano.fedorapeople.org/test/cronie-1.4.3-3.fc13.src.rpm

rsyslog-4.4.2-3

Reproducer: start crond with -s option and create simple command e.g.
crontab -e
* * * * * echo sometext

The output will be cut as in previous post. This might be a problem of rsyslog, which can't handle it. CC'ing maintainer of rsyslog.
Comment 5 Will Woods 2010-02-15 21:23:06 UTC 
I can't reproduce the problem. I did:

crontab -e
* * * * * echo test

Feb 15 16:20:49 kraid crontab[27262]: (wwoods) BEGIN EDIT (wwoods)
Feb 15 16:20:54 kraid crontab[27262]: (wwoods) REPLACE (wwoods)
Feb 15 16:20:54 kraid crontab[27262]: (wwoods) END EDIT (wwoods)
Feb 15 16:21:01 kraid crond[27254]: (wwoods) RELOAD (/var/spool/cron/wwoods)
Feb 15 16:21:01 kraid CROND[27268]: (wwoods) CMD (echo test)
Feb 15 16:21:01 kraid CROND[27268]: test
Feb 15 16:22:01 kraid CROND[27279]: (wwoods) CMD (echo test)
Feb 15 16:22:01 kraid CROND[27279]: test
[etc]

I'm using rsyslog-4.4.2-6.fc13.i686. Maybe it was an rsyslog bug that's fixed now?
Comment 6 Marcela Mašláňová 2010-02-16 08:04:04 UTC 
I have still the same problem. I tested on todays rawhide.  Do you have some special setting e.g other than LANG=en_US.UTF-8?
Comment 7 Marcela Mašláňová 2010-02-16 08:20:18 UTC 
And updated srpm http://mmaslano.fedorapeople.org/test/cronie-1.4.3-3.fc13.src.rpm
Comment 8 Will Woods 2010-02-16 18:11:58 UTC 
LANG=en_US.UTF-8 on my test system; can you reproduce the problem with that locale? What LANG setting is used on the system where you see the problem?
Comment 9 Marcela Mašláňová 2010-02-17 07:22:35 UTC 
I have the same LANG.
rpm -q rsyslog
rsyslog-4.4.2-6.fc13.i686
Comment 10 Peter Robinson 2010-03-22 21:52:53 UTC 
What is the status of getting this into Fedora-13
Comment 11 Marcela Mašláňová 2010-03-23 08:01:17 UTC 
The patch was included in cronie-1.4.4, but I still see problem, which I've mentioned in comment#3.
Comment 12 Will Woods 2010-03-23 14:54:39 UTC 
I still can't reproduce the problem, on 4 different systems..

Marcela, what's your system LANG (in /etc/sysconfig/i18n)? Can you try to reproduce the problem on a freshly-installed F13 (alpha) system?
Comment 13 Will Woods 2010-03-23 15:03:21 UTC 
On second thought, we should probably close this bug (since the patch requested has been merged - thanks!) and open a new bug for the problem you saw in comment #3.

I've opened bug 576225 for that problem. Thanks again.
Comment 14 Marcela Mašláňová 2010-03-23 16:13:43 UTC 
(In reply to comment #12)
> I still can't reproduce the problem, on 4 different systems..
> 
> Marcela, what's your system LANG (in /etc/sysconfig/i18n)? Can you try to
> reproduce the problem on a freshly-installed F13 (alpha) system?    

LANG="en_US.UTF-8"
SYSFONT="latarcyrheb-sun16"

I don't have fresh install, I've updated F-14 (current rawhide). I've never have my Czech locales on this test machine ;-)