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authorRainer Gerhards <rgerhards@adiscon.com>2008-04-08 11:48:07 +0200
committerRainer Gerhards <rgerhards@adiscon.com>2008-04-08 11:48:07 +0200
commit413fba03dc88bafb581554bcb07eacfdb9327588 (patch)
tree5e0d4ea4ee08cef22605a99e920c335695e185c0 /doc
parent160ab44ef91a19f7bd92afb629a8a06a5fe34fc4 (diff)
downloadrsyslog-413fba03dc88bafb581554bcb07eacfdb9327588.tar.gz
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rsyslog-413fba03dc88bafb581554bcb07eacfdb9327588.zip
finalized mail output support
Diffstat (limited to 'doc')
-rw-r--r--doc/features.html4
-rw-r--r--doc/ommail.html107
-rw-r--r--doc/rsyslog_conf.html2
-rw-r--r--doc/rsyslog_ng_comparison.html18
4 files changed, 122 insertions, 9 deletions
diff --git a/doc/features.html b/doc/features.html
index f74f2aaf..13fc34c6 100644
--- a/doc/features.html
+++ b/doc/features.html
@@ -23,7 +23,7 @@ to MySQL databases</a></li>
<li> native support for writing to Postgres databases</li>
<li>direct support for Firebird/Interbase,
OpenTDS (MS SQL, Sybase), SQLLite, Ingres, Oracle, and mSQL via libdbi,
-a database abstraction layer (almost as good as native)</li>
+a database abstraction layer (almost as good as native)</li><li>native support for <a href="ommail.html">sending mail messages</a> (first seen in 3.17.0)</li>
<li>support for (plain) tcp based syslog - much better
reliability</li>
<li>support for sending and receiving compressed syslog messages</li>
@@ -35,7 +35,7 @@ into syslog messages (one per line)</li>
<li>ability to configure backup syslog/database servers - if
the primary fails, control is switched to a prioritized list of backups</li>
<li>support for receiving messages via reliable <a href="http://www.monitorware.com/Common/en/glossary/rfc3195.php">
-RFC 3195</a> delivery</li>
+RFC 3195</a> delivery (a bit clumpsy to build right now...)</li>
<li>ability to generate file names and directories (log
targets) dynamically, based on many different properties</li>
<li>control of log output format, including ability to present
diff --git a/doc/ommail.html b/doc/ommail.html
new file mode 100644
index 00000000..e147e94c
--- /dev/null
+++ b/doc/ommail.html
@@ -0,0 +1,107 @@
+<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
+<html><head><title>mail output module - sending syslog messages via mail</title>
+
+</head>
+<body>
+<h1>Mail Output Module (ommail)</h1>
+<p><b>Module Name:&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; ommail</b></p>
+<p><b>Author: </b>Rainer Gerhards
+&lt;rgerhards@adiscon.com&gt;</p>
+<p><b>Description</b>:</p>
+<p>This module supports sending syslog messages via mail. Each
+syslog message is sent via its own mail. Obviously, you will want to
+apply rigorous filtering, otherwise your mailbox (and mail server) will
+be heavily spammed. The ommail plugin is primarily meant for alerting
+users. As such, it is assume that mails will only be sent in an
+extremely limited number of cases.</p>
+<p>Please note that ommail is especially well-suited to work in
+tandem with <a href="imfile.html">imfile</a> to
+watch files for the occurence of specific things to be alerted on. So
+its scope is far broader than forwarding syslog messages to mail
+recipients.</p>
+Ommail uses two templates, one for the mail body and one for the
+subject line. If neither is provided, a quite meaningless subject line
+is used and the mail body will be a syslog message just as if it were
+written to a file. It is expected that the users customizes both
+messages. In an effort to support cell phones (including SMS gateways),
+there is an option to turn off the body part at all. This is considered
+to be useful to send a short alert to a pager-like device.<span style="font-weight: bold;"></span>
+<p><b>Configuration Directives</b>:</p>
+<ul>
+<li><span style="font-weight: bold;">$ActionMailSMTPServer</span><br>
+Name or IP address of the SMTP server to be used. Must currently be
+set. The default is 127.0.0.1, the SMTP server on the local machine.
+Obviously it is not good to expect one to be present on each machine,
+so this value should be specified.<br>
+</li>
+<li><span style="font-weight: bold;">$ActionMailSMTPPort</span><br>
+Port number or name of the SMTP port to be used. The default is 25, the
+standard SMTP port.</li>
+<li><span style="font-weight: bold;">$ActionMailFrom</span><br>
+The email address used as the senders address. There is no default.</li>
+<li><span style="font-weight: bold;">$ActionMailTo</span><br>
+The recipients email address. There is no default.</li>
+<li><span style="font-weight: bold;">$ActionMailSubject</span><br>
+The name of the <span style="font-weight: bold;">template</span>
+to be used as the mail subject. If this is not specified, a more or
+less meaningless mail subject is generated (we don't tell you the exact
+text because that can change - if you want to have something specific,
+configure it!).</li>
+<li><span style="font-weight: bold;">$ActionMailEnableBody</span><br>
+Setting this to "off" permits to exclude the actual message body. This
+may be useful for pager-like devices or cell phone SMS messages. The
+default is "on", which is appropriate for allmost all cases. Turn it
+off only if you know exactly what you do!</li>
+</ul>
+<b>Caveats/Known Bugs:</b>
+<p>The current ommail implementation supports <span style="font-weight: bold;">SMTP-direct mode</span>
+only. In that mode, the plugin talks to the mail server via SMTP
+protocol. No other process is involved. This mode offers best
+reliability as it is not depending on any external entity except the
+mail server. Mail server downtime is acceptable if the action is put
+onto its own action queue, so that it may wait for the SMTP server to
+come back online. However, the module implements only the bare SMTP
+essentials. Most importantly, it does not provide any authentication
+capabilities. So your mail server must be configured to accept incoming
+mail from ommail without any authentication needs (this may be change
+in the future as need arises, but you may also be referred to
+sendmail-mode).</p>
+<p>In theory, ommail should also offer a mode where it uses the
+sendmail utility to send its mail (<span style="font-weight: bold;">sendmail-mode</span>).
+This is somewhat less reliable (because we depend on an entity we do
+not have close control over - sendmail). It also requires dramatically
+more system ressources, as we need to load the external process (but
+that should be no problem given the expected infrequent number of calls
+into this plugin). The big advantage of sendmail mode is that it
+supports all the bells and whistles of a full-blown SMTP implementation
+and may even work for local delivery without a SMTP server being
+present. Sendmail mode will be implemented as need arises. So if you
+need it, please drop us a line (I nobody does, sendmail mode will
+probably never be implemented).</p>
+<p><b>Sample:</b></p>
+<p>The following sample alerts the operator if the string "hard
+disk fatal failure" is present inside a syslog message. The mail server
+at mail.example.net is used and the subject shall be "disk problem on
+&lt;hostname&gt;". Note how \r\n is included inside the body
+text
+to create line breaks.<br>
+</p>
+<textarea rows="15" cols="60">$ModLoad ommail
+$ActionMailSMTPServer mail.example.net
+$ActionMailFrom rsyslog@example.net
+$ActionMailTo operator@example.net
+$template mailSubject,"disk problem on %hostname%"
+$template mailBody,"RSYSLOG Alert\r\nmsg='%msg%'"
+$ActionMailSubject mailSubject
+if $msg contains 'hard disk fatal failure' then :ommail:;mailBody
+</textarea>
+<p>[<a href="rsyslog_conf.html">rsyslog.conf overview</a>]
+[<a href="manual.html">manual index</a>] [<a href="http://www.rsyslog.com/">rsyslog site</a>]</p>
+<p><font size="2">This documentation is part of the
+<a href="http://www.rsyslog.com/">rsyslog</a>
+project.<br>
+Copyright © 2008 by <a href="http://www.gerhards.net/rainer">Rainer
+Gerhards</a> and
+<a href="http://www.adiscon.com/">Adiscon</a>.
+Released under the GNU GPL version 3 or higher.</font></p>
+</body></html> \ No newline at end of file
diff --git a/doc/rsyslog_conf.html b/doc/rsyslog_conf.html
index 2a0f0c60..481abb38 100644
--- a/doc/rsyslog_conf.html
+++ b/doc/rsyslog_conf.html
@@ -32,7 +32,7 @@ trap output module</li><li><a href="omrelp.html">omrelp</a> - RELP output module
<li>ompgsql - output module for PostgreSQL</li>
<li><a href="omlibdbi.html">omlibdbi</a> -
generic database output module (Firebird/Interbase, MS SQL, Sybase,
-SQLLite, Ingres, Oracle, mSQL)</li>
+SQLLite, Ingres, Oracle, mSQL)</li><li><a href="ommail.html">ommail</a> - permits rsyslog to alert folks by mail if something important happens</li>
<li><a href="imfile.html">imfile</a>
-&nbsp; input module for text files</li><li><a href="imrelp.html">imrelp</a> - RELP input module</li>
<li>imudp - udp syslog message input</li>
diff --git a/doc/rsyslog_ng_comparison.html b/doc/rsyslog_ng_comparison.html
index 4ee8c10b..28413337 100644
--- a/doc/rsyslog_ng_comparison.html
+++ b/doc/rsyslog_ng_comparison.html
@@ -1,11 +1,11 @@
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
-<html><head>
-<title>rsyslog vs. syslog-ng - a comparison</title>
+<html><head><title>rsyslog vs. syslog-ng - a comparison</title>
+
</head>
<body>
<h1>rsyslog vs. syslog-ng</h1>
<p><small><i>Written by <a href="http://www.gerhards.net/rainer">Rainer Gerhards</a>
-(2008-02-28)</i></small></p>
+(2008-04-08)</i></small></p>
<p>We have often been asked about a comparison sheet between
rsyslog and syslog-ng. Unfortunately, I do not know much about
syslog-ng, I did not even use it once. Also, there seems to be no
@@ -341,7 +341,9 @@ be placed on different disk</td>
<td valign="top">ability to process spooled
messages only during a configured timeframe (e.g. process messages only
during off-peak hours, during peak hours they are enqueued only)</td>
-<td valign="top"><a href="http://wiki.rsyslog.com/index.php/OffPeakHours">yes</a><br>(can independently be configured for the main queue and each action queue)</td>
+<td valign="top"><a href="http://wiki.rsyslog.com/index.php/OffPeakHours">yes</a><br>
+(can independently be configured for the main queue and each action
+queue)</td>
<td valign="top">no</td>
</tr>
<tr>
@@ -424,6 +426,10 @@ including ability to present channel and priority as visible log data</td>
<td valign="top">yes</td>
<td valign="top">not sure...</td>
</tr>
+<tr><td valign="top">native ability to send mail messages</td>
+<td valign="top">yes (<a href="ommail.html">ommail</a>, introduced in 3.17.0)</td>
+<td valign="top">not sure...</td>
+</tr>
<tr>
<td valign="top">good timestamp format control; at a
minimum, ISO 8601/RFC 3339 second-resolution UTC zone</td>
@@ -572,6 +578,6 @@ feature sheet. I have not yet been able to fully work through it. In
the mean time, you may want to read it in parallel. It is available at
<a href="http://www.balabit.com/network-security/syslog-ng/features/detailed/">Balabit's
site</a>.</p>
-<p>This document is current as of 2008-04-07 and definitely
+<p>This document is current as of 2008-04-08 and definitely
incomplete (I did not yet manage to complete it!).</p>
-</body></html>
+</body></html> \ No newline at end of file