I have a server wich will be on a network as a backup server. For most of the time it will be idle, so I'd like the disks to be spun down. I'm using Debian woody, and by defult it runs exim every 15 minutes using a cron job. This causes text to be written to auth.log and syslog.

I cannot remove the cron job because I want local mail to be delivered from debconf etc. I could set the delay to something like a day, but that woudln't erase the problem.

I'm not very familiar with the syslog.conf syntax, so I'm asking for help.

Can I change to another MTA that wouldn't have this "feature" or how can I have these messages not be written in to the log. I would like other cron and auth messages to be written. Just not these.

Thanks in advance. You can find more info about this project in the wiki under Installing_woody

Insert this line before the relevant job in the crontab:
MAILTO=""

This will stop sending mail notifications on any subsequent jobs.

Uuh.. Maybe I wasn't clear. The problem isn't the mail. I don't mind mail. I mind that when exim checks the queue every 15 minutes using cron, I get a logmessage, wich forces the harddisk to spin up. That bothers me.

I have a smiliar need to clean up syslog. I get these rows in syslog every 5 minutes
and I'd like to hide them, they are useless to me. The little program, vnstat, on the other hand is great, I'm not going to sacrifice it . My dream situation is to only have interesting stuff written in syslog - worthwhile information on every row.

I haven't figured out yet how to hide the above CRON messages in syslog, so if you have a clue, throw in a line. So far I've only tried adding ">>/dev/null 2>&1" to /etc/cron.d/vnstat where the CRON job is located at. It didn't seem to do anything (assuming cron automatically reloads cron.d files when their moddate changes).

I run Mandrake 9.2 / 2.4.22

Actually that is a message from cron, so you need to edit syslog.conf and redirect cron stuff somewhere else. Problem is, I don't know how not to redirect *everything* that comes from cron, just one thing. :-(

hi
for example if u have this line

cron.* /var/log/cron

this means that all ur messages from cron will redirect to /var/log/cron
so to change ur log create a different file anywhere say
/test/cron

then redirect ur output there by

cron.* /test/cron

also restart syslog service to make changes take effect now.

the problem u might face here is that these log mesag ahave a entry in logrotate.conf which keep a chweck on the size of the logs.
so u may need to do some editing

correct me if i am wrong here that even if ur backup server is running all the time,and even if it is doing no work at all
then too i think the disks do keep on spinning all the time

regards