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Comment by zokier | Hacker News Reader

To me the olden way of every server running some email daemon in the background always felt so weird; the only purpose seemed to be a black hole for a things like sudo and cron write their messages to, something surely a simple log file would have sufficed for.

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Eh. I felt that way until I configured my MTA correctly on FreeBSD and I was suddenly receiving emails with package out-of-date notifications, summaries of failed cron jobs, etc that are more suited as “push” than “pull” unless it’s your job to monitor the logs on an hourly/daily basis.

There's a ton of basically-forgotten system-level functionality that's tossed aside in favor of complex aggregator services and SPA dashboards and new configuration systems and such.

You can get a hell of a lot of mileage out of knowing which parts of your system can be swapped out or configured in interesting ways, but these days you're more likely to treat your OS as a dumb binary-runner and let a dozen SaaS do all the interesting stuff instead.

Kinda like people who treat their DB as a dumb datastore and don't actually leverage any interesting or distinctive features of it. I guess it's nice that your system can be ported to almost any datastore without trouble, but... man you'd have saved yourself a lot of time, bugs, and money if you'd just actually leveraged your DB. Seems operating systems are getting the same treatment. Why learn to configure a forwarding log daemon when you can just ship to logstash? Why use email alerts when you have pagerduty and an uptime monitor and just auto-rebuild any instances that error? Why use full-featured filesystems like ZFS, and really take advantage of its capabilities to easily add features that'd otherwise be very difficult or to attain much greater server reliability/uptime if you're gonna store everything on S3 and your instances are ephemeral? But then one wonders, why run an actual full OS in the first place, then, if you're not going to use it at all? And indeed, I gather some are moving away from that, for precisely that reason (e.g. Firecracker, "serverless")

Me, I find myself digging deeper and deeper into letting the OS, system services, and mature daemons solve problems for me, rather than searching Github first thing for whatever half-baked Nodejs "webscale" solution there is, or DIYing something that treats the OS as nothing but a job-runner and socket-provider. But that seems to be dinosaur thinking these days.

I think you know this as you mention "olden way" - it's definitely the thread of history where most UNIX servers were multi-user systems: that's how I was first exposed to Unix, even though by late 80's/early 90's most of them were Linux or a *BSD. In those - presumably University mostly - environments, we mostly sent email to each other and that was often between servers on a campus or environment. It made sense then that each server sent email because you were specifically user@host.someplace.

When the distros started to expand, being a smarthost was the most common configuration. Today, I agree with you the only reason for any sort of SMTP daemon is for programs to send email - all the users are on Google/Slack.

That's exactly my problem today - I have some old PCs repurposed as homelab, and they require some cron jobs to keep them in check - like forcing modules, or keeping the fans from whining. Without any MTA, it's such a chore to learn why something is failing. In this age, the whole "cron only sends output logs through email" seems super anachronistic.

People pay for services to get unified status dashboards for all their shit, despite having logs on disk they could use instead.

A correctly-configured MTA on all your servers, and a few email filters on the client side, are basically the old-school version of that.

Guess it's some leftover from ye olde days when machines were multiuser things, lovingly cared for by sysadmins. In such a world, might make sense to have local mail delivery on each host.

It saves having every program that might want to send mail from requiring configuration.

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