Nagios Support Forum

Just installed nagios on a backup email server. The server holds email if the primary goes down until the primary comes back online. I have nagios check the smtp connection on the backup where nagios is installed. It works well except for the error I get in the maillog everytime nagios checks the smtp connection. The error is "localhost.localdomain [127.0.0.1] did not issue MAIL/EXPN/VRFY/ETRN during connection to smtp".

I know that this error is not hurting anything, but I would like to keep the maillog size to a minimum. I have looked for a few days and have not found a reasonable way to stop this error. Does anyone have any solutions to this issue?

Thanks

From a Nagios perspective there's not really much you can do about it... It's more so the prerogative of the mail retention application, maybe you can disable warnings/informational logging with it?

There are a couple of things you can try to do.

1) Try to set sendmail to not log connections that do not do anything or,

2) Write a custom plugin that actually *does* something every time it runs (e.g. VRFY [email protected]), but that's likely to log something as well and you're back to square one.

Ultimately, you may wind up "postprocessing" your mail logs at the usual rotation period to remove the entries that are known to be caused by the monitoring suite.