Description of problem: yum-updatesd does not send notification emails despite the fact that it is configured to do that. Below is the contents of /etc/yum/yum-updatesd.conf [main] # how often to check for new updates (in seconds) # 259200s = 3d run_interval = 3600 # how often to allow checking on request (in seconds) updaterefresh = 600 # how to send notifications (valid: dbus, email, syslog) emit_via = email email_to = root email_from = root # automatically install updates do_update = no # automatically download updates do_download = no # automatically download deps of updates do_download_deps = no Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): yum-3.2.8-2.fc7 yum-updatesd-3.2.8-2.fc7 How reproducible: At will. Steps to Reproduce: 1. Verify email from root to root functions. 2. Set up yum-updatesd.conf as set above (make run_interval = 600 for testing) 3. Run yum check-update to verify that there actually are packets to be updated 3. Start yum-updatesd 4. Wait... Actual results: Nothing is received. Expected results: E-mail received at intervals specified. Additional info:
The problem is that the yum-updatesd program in Fedora 7 (and, alas, RHEL5) is very... inflexible... when it comes to notifications via email. Specifically, the F7 yum-updatesd code uses an SMTP instance from the smtplib Python module, but doesn't allow you to customize the host/port in yum-updatesd.conf. Because the SMTP instance defaults to localhost:25, if no SMTP daemon is listening on port 25 of localhost, yum-updatesd silently fails to send mail. (At least, from my read of the code, if there's an SMTP listen on port 25 of localhost, I think it should work. I honestly haven't tried.) So, if you don't have an SMTP listener, you're out of luck; yum-updatesd in Fedora 7 doesn't know how to submit mail messages by invoking a command-line sendmail. In Fedora 8, yum-updatesd was forked into a separate package, and many of its egregious problems were fixed: email notifications will actually work without an SMTP listener, it no longer wakes up 100 times per second (!), it doesn't hold TCP sockets open in CLOSE_WAIT forever, etc. IMHO, pre-F8 yum-updatesd is simply too buggy to use. If you can't update to F8, I'd simply stick a "yum check-update" cron job into cron.daily, and turn off yum-updatesd. Jeremy, is there any realistic hope of backporting the fixed yum-updatesd from F8 to F7 or (even better) RHEL5? (I care much more about RHEL5 than F7, but since RHEL5 has yum-3.0.1, that might not be trivial...)
A new yum/yum-updatesd is planned for RHEL-5.2, so that should solve the RHEL problem.
Excellent.
An investigation of how exactly the SMTP server on localhost:25 behaved (using telnet), it was found that a no-domain MAIL FROM: identifier was not accepted. Fixed the issue by changing in /etc/yum/yum-updatesd.conf email_from = root to email_from = root@localhost The e-mail message however is so bland, that I will revert to what was suggested earlier: a yum check-updates in cron.weekly. It seems that yum- updatesd in FC8 has a much sexier message, with an actual list of packages that could be updated. Any chance that it would be ported back to FC7?
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There's no sense in backporting to Fedora 7 now, and this should be fixed in RHEL 5.2. I'd suggest closing with CURRENTRELEASE or NEXTRELEASE...