Automated submission of kernel panic reports: sysutils/panicmail

[Colin Percival]

On 11/04/13 18:26, Thomas Mueller wrote:
> Question that arises is how does the system know where to send the email, and through what SMTP server, especially if panicmail_autosubmit="YES".

The code assumes that your system knows how to deliver email.  An out-of-the-box
FreeBSD install has sendmail and can do this.  If you don't enable
panicmail_autosubmit then it also assumes you're reading or forwarding root's
email -- which you should be doing anyway.

> In the case of a kernel panic, wouldn't the system crash/freeze, and would it then be able to compose an email message?

The email is generated from the crashdump when the system next boots.

> I use mail/mpop and mail/msmtp rather than messing with sendmail or postfix; have multiple email accounts and inboxes.
> 
> Now come to think of it, I don't think I ever sent an email from FreeBSD as root, only as nonroot.

Don't you get "daily run output" and "security run output" emails?

> Something like panicmail ought to be ported to NetBSD pkgsrc, considering that NetBSD seems so much more unstable and crash-prone than FreeBSD on my hardware.

Go right ahead.  It's a small shell script -- might even work fine without
any changes.  It's BSD licensed, of course.

-- 
Colin Percival
Security Officer Emeritus, FreeBSD | The power to serve
Founder, Tarsnap | www.tarsnap.com | Online backups for the truly paranoid