I have a very small issue in the configuration of the periodic framework. If I configure the following in periodic.conf daily_show_success="NO" daily_show_info="YES" daily_show_badconfig="YES" security_show_success="NO" security_show_info="YES" security_show_badconfig="YES" daily_status_security_enable="YES" daily_status_security_inline="YES" I would expect that I will not get a daily email when there is no warning or error. However, I get every day an empty email with the following line: #### Start of email #### Return-Path: <root@xxx> X-Original-To: root@xxx To: root@xxx Subject: xxx daily run output Date: Mon, 16 Feb 2015 03:02:00 +0100 (CET) Security check: -- End of daily output -- #### End of email #### It would be much nicer if the line "Security check:" was not printed (and hence no email was send) when there are no security events to report. In my opinion the daily_show_success="NO" and security_show_success="NO" options should mean that this empty header is not to be printed.
Hi Frank, This is not straightforward to do so because as you can see on the URL below this message is printed before calling periodic(8) again for security: https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base/head/etc/periodic/daily/450.status-security?view=markup So there are two solutions: 1. remove this message altogether; this is problematic if the security output is inlined 2. print only this message if there is any output from periodic security; but this requires to bufferize the whole output and then print the caption only if the output is not empty I would favor 2 but it's a bit hackish and heavyweight for the purpose. Let this bug bake a bit to see if others have some input.
Whilst I have briefly tried FreeBSD and PCBSD / TrueOS a few times in the past, I am currently setting up my first serious FreeBSD server and this is the first issue I have been unable to resolve with serious searching and experimentation. Like the OP, I would like to utilise periodic and have it run daily but I don't want daily mails being sent, or more specifically I don't want any mails being sent if there are no errors or warnings from any of periodics checks. In my case I configured periodic.conf like so: -------------------------- daily_show_success="NO" daily_show_info="NO" daily_show_badconfig="NO" weekly_show_success="NO" weekly_show_info="NO" weekly_show_badconfig="NO" monthly_show_success="NO" monthly_show_info="NO" monthly_show_badconfig="NO" # Include security jobs with daily email. No need to send second email. daily_status_security_inline="YES" security_show_success="NO" # Don't need to know about denied packets every day daily_status_security_ipfdenied_enable="NO" -------------------------- Which, on a 'good' day, will output an email with a body containing: -------------------------- Security check: hostname kernel log messages: -- End of security output -- -- End of daily output -- -------------------------- That is effectively empty and so ideally, I shouldn't receive a mail at all if that's all it contains. I know I can redirect periodic's output into log files but I'd never read them and because periodic doesn't know when not to send an email (esp. for daily checks) I currently have no other option than to disable it entirely until this gets fixed, do I? I am running FreeBSD 11.0 amd64