MRTG cron job mail

[TBT]

We are currently receiving emails from the /etc/cron.d/mrtg cron entry (Debian 10 installation) every few minutes from each of our Nagios machines.

Sample headers:

Code: Select all

From:	Cron Daemon <root@host.domain.com>
Subject:	Cron <root@host> LANG=C LC_ALL=C /usr/bin/mrtg /etc/mrtg/mrtg.cfg --lock-file /var/lib/mrtg/mrtg.lock --confcache-file /var/lib/mrtg/mrtg.ok --user=nagios --group=nagios
Date:	Tue, 15 Feb, 22 6:35:11PM
Message-ID:	<E1nK2fP-0001lR-KH@host>

And the body of the message is a listing mrtg errors, sometimes thousands of lines.

Would it be okay to redirect the output of that cron job to /dev/null, similar to the other Nagios cron jobs we have?

[jdunitz]

It might be better to address the errors (perhaps you have a lot of abandoned files that need to be cleaned up?) but as long as MRTG seems to be working and your perfdata is current/seems accurate/is doing what you want/etc, you should be OK to direct it to /dev/null, or at least to a single file that gets overwritten each time, just in case you feel the need to refer to it sometime.

Code: Select all

[root@jpd-nagiosxi-one cron.d]# cat /etc/cron.d/mrtg
*/5 * * * * root LANG=C LC_ALL=C /usr/bin/mrtg /etc/mrtg/mrtg.cfg --lock-file /var/lib/mrtg/mrtg.lock --confcache-file /var/lib/mrtg/mrtg.ok --user=nagios --group=nagios --user=nagios --group=nagios
[root@jpd-nagiosxi-one cron.d]#

--Jeffrey