New server request

[mikea]

On Tue, Apr 08, 2008 at 07:48:55PM -0400, Furnish, Trever G wrote:

> Not really what you're looking for, but I run a small shell script that
> sends a daily report of the previous day's delay reading as logged by
> the sendmail process that handles mail in the queue after MailScanner
> processes messages.  My set-up only handles mail coming in from the
> Internet to internal users, which makes the logic simpler.  YMMV --
> you'd definitely need to change the code at least a little to fit your
> environment, especially to distinguish between "inbound Internet mail"
> and others.
> 
> It produces output like so:
> 
> Output from script /sysadm/scripts/local/report_delay.sh running on host
> relay2.public.herff-jones.com under account root.
> 
> This report shows the delay for message delivery as reported by sendmail
> (...are you running sendmail?).  These are only messages that were
> already passed through by MS -- some 180K msgs are blocked each day by
> the same system.

[skip delay-length report]

> The report only comes to me so I haven't worried about fixing the
> outlying cases that appear to have taken nearly an hour -- they're not
> real problems.
> 
> You could easily get more granular if you need to.  Having the report
> helps me rest more easily -- I had no stats to back up my claim that
> there wasn't a problem the first time I had a conversation with someone
> claiming delivery was unreasonably slow.  The "anything under three days
> is good per the RFC" argument didn't go over very well. :-)
> 
> I'm embarrassed by some of the code -- hit me up off-list if you want
> the script, but I mostly thought the idea might be useful. :-)

I've independently flanged up a similar script, which provides reports
for me and (when people start complaining about delays) management. It
has proven very useful to me for tweaking things, and to management 
for mollifying users. 

-- 
Mike Andrews, W5EGO
mikea at mikea.ath.cx
Tired old sysadmin