What do slackers put in cron.*

ttk · 12-16-2012, 04:32 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by g4ry

Another thing I was thinking about was retrieving gmail, does anyone do this?

Yes! Your gmail is available via IMAP, and mbsync works quite nicely to retrieve it all.

This is my ~/.mbsyncrc, with some sekrit parts swapped out with "foo", "YOURGMAILPASSWORD", "YOURGMAILLOGIN", or "YOURNAME":

Code:

Expunge None
Create Both
MaildirStore local
Path /home/YOURNAME/Maildir/
Trash Trash

IMAPStore foo
Host imap.gmail.com
UseIMAPS yes
User YOURGMAILLOGIN
Pass YOURGMAILPASSWORD
CertificateFile /etc/pki/tls/certs/ca-bundle.crt
RequireSSL yes

Channel foo
Master :foo:
Slave  :local:
Sync PullNew

With this in place, the command "mbsync foo" pulls all of my gmail messages into ~/Maildir/

Come to think of it, putting this in /etc/cron.weekly seems like a pretty good idea. I will do that.

g4ry · 12-17-2012, 05:42 AM

@ttk thanks for your example config file, I added my info onto mine but when I run mbsync foo it complains about /etc/pki/tls/certs/ca-bundle.crt no such file or directory. Is there a package I'm missing, or is there something I need to do to create it?

Ok, sorted the cert issue out but I'm having trouble with Maildir

Reading configuration file /home/me/.mbsyncrc
Resolving imap.gmail.com... ok
Connecting to 173.194.66.108:993... ok
Connection is now encrypted
Logging in...
Channel foo
Selecting slave INBOX... Maildir error: '/home/me/Maildir/' is no valid mailbox

Thanks.

ttk · 12-17-2012, 09:40 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by g4ry

@ttk thanks for your example config file, I added my info onto mine but when I run mbsync foo it complains about /etc/pki/tls/certs/ca-bundle.crt no such file or directory. Is there a package I'm missing, or is there something I need to do to create it?

Thanks.

I don't remember where I got mine, but looking at the comments in the file itself it appears to be derived from the mozilla sources:

Code:

## ca-bundle.crt -- Bundle of CA Root Certificates
##
## Converted at: Tue Sep 22 09:25:27 2009 UTC
##
## This is a bundle of X.509 certificates of public Certificate Authorities
## (CA). These were automatically extracted from Mozilla's root certificates
## file (certdata.txt).  This file can be found in the mozilla source tree:
## '/mozilla/security/nss/lib/ckfw/builtins/certdata.txt'
##
## It contains the certificates in PEM format and therefore
## can be directly used with curl / libcurl / php_curl, or with
## an Apache+mod_ssl webserver for SSL client authentication.
## Just configure this file as the SSLCACertificateFile.
##

I see a mozilla-1.9.2/security/nss/lib/ckfw/builtins/certdata.txt in a firefox source tarball, but it's not obvious to me how to extract ca-bundle.crt from certdata.txt.

Aha -- here's a script which claims to do it all for you. I haven't tested it, but see if it works for you:
http://www.floodgap.com/software/tty...-ca-bundle.txt

Alternatively, if you're feeling trusting, you could just download the file I've been using here:
http://ciar.org/ttk/public/ca-bundle.crt.txt

ttk · 12-17-2012, 09:43 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by g4ry

Selecting slave INBOX... Maildir error: '/home/me/Maildir/' is no valid mailbox
Thanks.

It's a bit picky about its Maildir format. This should work:
# mkdir -p /home/me/Maildir/cur /home/me/Maildir/new /home/me/Maildir/tmp
# chmod -R 700 /home/me/Maildir

g4ry · 12-17-2012, 09:57 AM

Thanks ttk, that worked

... I got my ca-certificates.crt in /etc/ssl/certs/ and it seems to work fine, whether that's the correct thing to do. I'll have a look at your links though. What do you use to read your mail from your inbox?

ttk · 12-17-2012, 10:20 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by g4ry

Thanks ttk, that worked

... I got my ca-certificates.crt in /etc/ssl/certs/ and it seems to work fine, whether that's the correct thing to do. I'll have a look at your links though. What do you use to read your mail from your inbox?

"grep" and "less", mostly :-) I primarily use it for searching. But mutt reads from a Maildir quite nicely too.

You'll want to read this: http://www.elho.net/mutt/maildir/

g4ry · 12-17-2012, 10:53 AM

Thanks once again ttk, everything seems to be working fine and mutt works great after that link you posted.

Cheers

ttk · 12-17-2012, 12:06 PM

Yay! :-) I'm glad it works for you.

I just added this as /etc/cron.weekly/archive-gmail.sh:

Code:

#!/bin/sh
su -l -c '/usr/bin/mbsync foo' ttk

Triggering it manually (as root) appears to do the expected thing.

Beelzebud · 12-17-2012, 03:01 PM

I use a cronjob to update a bash script every 5 mins that will echo to /etc/issue, so that when I open a terminal I see correct and updated values for HDD space, uptime, etc.

Diantre · 12-17-2012, 03:50 PM

Among other things (backups, clean up tasks, etc.), I have a crontab entry to backup the crontab itself, just in case I screw it up, which has happened before.

Code:

5 17 * * sun crontab -l | gzip - > $HOME/Backup/crontab-$(date +%Y%m%d_%H%M%S).gz

Poprocks · 12-18-2012, 07:26 PM

Personally I don't know why anyone would use mbsync when Slackware comes with perfectly good copies of fetchmail and getmail, but I digress.

Personally I use cron to run getmail every minute for my user account. My root's crontab is mainly used to do my nightly backups using rsync. I use /etc/cron.daily for this. Since I don't really use my root's mailspool for anything but receiving system messages, I turn off root crontab's default configuration of directing all system output to /dev/null and make it only output STDOUT to /dev/null.

That way, if an error occurs with my backup, the root user will get an email notifying me of same.