non-root postfix status?

[Eray Aslan]

I received a complaint from a user that postfix status command is for
root only and that he cannot - or rather the monitoring software cannot
- use that command to monitor postfix's health.

What would be a good way to monitor postfix as a non-privileged user
without going through the sudoers route?

--
Eray Aslan

[Wietse Venema]

Eray Aslan:

> I received a complaint from a user that postfix status command is for
> root only and that he cannot - or rather the monitoring software cannot
> - use that command to monitor postfix's health.

The postfix command is reserved for the super-user.

If you only want to know if the master daemon runs, then you need
to access the "master.pid" file which is not accessible by users.

If you want to know if Postfix actually works, then you need to
send email to a specified address and find out if that message
arrives within some deadline.

Wietse

[Noel Jones]

On 8/14/2012 6:22 AM, Eray Aslan wrote:
> I received a complaint from a user that postfix status command is for
> root only and that he cannot - or rather the monitoring software cannot
> - use that command to monitor postfix's health.
>

> What would be a good way to monitor postfix as a non-privileged user
> without going through the sudoers route?
>

Postfix is extremely stable and doesn't need much monitoring.
Something like "tcping localhost 25" is a sufficient non-root test
to see if postfix is running.

IMHO it's more helpful to monitor the postfix queue to make sure it
isn't growing at an unusual rate, and to monitor whatever external
content filters, policy services, and milters your postfix depends
on. But you'll probably need root for that too.




-- Noel Jones

[Andrei Vinogradov]

On 14 августа 2012 14:22:41 Eray Aslan wrote:
> I received a complaint from a user that postfix status command is for
> root only and that he cannot - or rather the monitoring software cannot
> - use that command to monitor postfix's health.
>
> What would be a good way to monitor postfix as a non-privileged user
> without going through the sudoers route?

In gentoo ? ;)

ps -ax|grep master

P.S
The question probably is not correct - basic process can work, and smtpd, for
example, does not accept mail.
For what purpose you want it?

--
Regards:
A. Vinogradov
System Administrator
SIA "Taudat"
and...@tau.lv

[Eray Aslan]

On 08/14/2012 04:54 PM, Andrei Vinogradov wrote:
> For what purpose you want it?

To learn how people monitor their mail infrastructure so that I can get
back with a good answer and see if there is a better alternative.

Also, requiring super-user privilege did not seem right at first glance
for postfix status output - it is not privileged info. But this is a
moot point now after Wietse's answer.

--
Eray Aslan