mail / mailx question

[matt-urrlRJtNKRMsHrnhXWJB8w at public.gmane.org (Matt Shields)]

On Wed, Dec 23, 2009 at 10:33 AM, Chandler, Scott <
Scott.Chandler-VQAUrahS1b5BDgjK7y7TUQ at public.gmane.org> wrote:

> Greetings,
>
> I'm new to the list so I'm not sure if this is the proper place to post
> questions like this. If not, please let me know the right place.
>
> We're using Nagios to monitor our equipment. It sends alerts through a
> locally installed copy of sendmail to our (end user) email server which then
> goes out to a pager. If the email server goes down, it won't do much good to
> send the alert to that server so I need an alternate alert which sends email
> through an outside address.
>
> Does anyone know the syntax for the mail command to send to a different
> SMTP server? It looks like there are a couple ways to do this, use the
> account switch, use an alternate .mailrc/mail.rc file, maybe more.
>
> Ideally, I'd like to have a standalone command without using a config file
> or script.
>
> Thanks in advance,
> Scott
> _______________________________________________
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> Discuss-mNDKBlG2WHs at public.gmane.org
> http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
>

We had this issue years ago where our mail server died and we didn't know
about it till the next morning.  For this reason we configured our Nagios
box to have it's own mail server running on it.  The main Nagios box
monitors all services in the datacenter, but we also have a remote Nagios
box monitoring the main one (and the core routers and firewalls of the
datacenter and a few other critical services), so we know if there is a
problem with the main Nagios box or with our main datacenter.  This second
Nagios box also runs it's own mail server.

-matt
http://www.sysadminvalley.com
http://www.beantownhost.com
http://www.linkedin.com/in/mattboston
Charles de Gaulle<http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/c/charles_de_gaulle.html>
- "The better I get to know men, the more I find myself loving dogs."