nagios-plugins-mailq unexpected dependency on ssmtp package?
Posted: Fri Nov 29, 2019 9:11 am
Hello,
We've been using Nagios and NRPE plugins for many years to monitor many servers that we setup as a hosting provider.
Since very recently, we suddenly got an unexpected and undesired issue with a dependency on the 'ssmtp' package when installing nagios-plugins-mailq with yum, on a DirectAdmin server.
DirectAdmin uses it's own CustomBuild script to compile the Exim MTA from source, which also provides the 'sendmail' symlinks on the system. The sendmail program is used by default for the PHP mail() function, but due to Exim's symlinks, this is actually handled by the Exim MTA, and this all used to work very well by default.
On our latest DirectAdmin server that we provisioned, somehow yum decided that the 'ssmtp' package is a dependency for nagios-plugins-mailq, and the installation of this ssmtp package breaks the sendmail program, by replacing the symlinks to its own binaries, resulting in a broken setup by default for everything that uses sendmail to send mail, including PHP's mail() function.
Upon trying to reproduce this behavior on different machines, we have been unsuccessful, but we still cannot get the nagios-plugins-mailq to install without also installing ssmtp.
Is there anyone here who had a similar experience, or could shed some light onto this undesired behavior? We'd like to keep monitoring the mail queue on this machine, but as it stands we cannot do so without breaking the sendmail functionality...we also would like to keep using yum and install packages without resorting to hacks and workarounds to fix something that never needed fixing before
With kind regards,
Oxilion B.V.
We've been using Nagios and NRPE plugins for many years to monitor many servers that we setup as a hosting provider.
Since very recently, we suddenly got an unexpected and undesired issue with a dependency on the 'ssmtp' package when installing nagios-plugins-mailq with yum, on a DirectAdmin server.
DirectAdmin uses it's own CustomBuild script to compile the Exim MTA from source, which also provides the 'sendmail' symlinks on the system. The sendmail program is used by default for the PHP mail() function, but due to Exim's symlinks, this is actually handled by the Exim MTA, and this all used to work very well by default.
On our latest DirectAdmin server that we provisioned, somehow yum decided that the 'ssmtp' package is a dependency for nagios-plugins-mailq, and the installation of this ssmtp package breaks the sendmail program, by replacing the symlinks to its own binaries, resulting in a broken setup by default for everything that uses sendmail to send mail, including PHP's mail() function.
Upon trying to reproduce this behavior on different machines, we have been unsuccessful, but we still cannot get the nagios-plugins-mailq to install without also installing ssmtp.
Is there anyone here who had a similar experience, or could shed some light onto this undesired behavior? We'd like to keep monitoring the mail queue on this machine, but as it stands we cannot do so without breaking the sendmail functionality...we also would like to keep using yum and install packages without resorting to hacks and workarounds to fix something that never needed fixing before
With kind regards,
Oxilion B.V.