Hello all,

I have a mail-related question for what might be a slightly unusual situation:

On my LAN, I have a server (Machine A) running that handles automated backups (via rsync/rsnapshot and a custom script). When it completes its backup, it sends out an email to my gmail account so that I am notified of the success/failure of the backup process (regardless of where I am at the time). Exim(4) is configured on this server as smarthost for this purpose.

Now, I have another machine (Machine B) on my LAN that I'm using for home security, and I'd like to have an email generated on certain security events, but rather than routing directly through my ISP, I want to have the outgoing email routed through the mail server on Machine A. It turns out that the security software I'm using on Machine B doesn't handle authentication correctly.

So, my question is this:

How can I config exim on Machine A to handle my outgoing email on Machine B (or any other machine on my LAN for that matter)?

Keep in mind that I don't care about handling incoming mail: I just need to generate email notifications from within my LAN and send them out to external destinations.

Intuitively, I know that whatever email app I use (e.g. mail) on Machine B needs to somehow understand that it must route to the mail server on Machine A, but I'm at a loss at understanding how this is accomplished.

Thanks much.

well on Machine A there's really nothing to configure, what you want there is a bog standard smtp host, configured to relay for local networks. I can't remember exactly what that option is within exim, but it's one of the few things you'll always configure. The harder bit is to get the email to go to it in the first place. if you run a script to send an email it should connect to the locally running sendmail instance (or sendmail replacement e.g. exim) which will accept the mail, do an MX lookup and send it off to wherever it wants to go. What you'd need to do here is either tell your own client to directly use the other SMTP server or configure that machine to use Machine A as a smart relay or relay host, i.e. don't pay attention to where the mail is going, just blindly give it to this other machine and let it worry about that.

Thanks for the response. Yes, this is exactly the situation that I'm faced at the moment: trying to figure out proper syntax for getting an email generated on one local machine on the LAN to the actual mail server (exim in this case).

For example, I'm used to using mail at the CLI for scripting email messages such as:

mail -s "Backup FAILURE" rich@email_address.com < email_file

However, this outgoing email needs to route to the proper machine on which the mail server is running. How (and/or what) do I configure in order to do this?

Thanks again.

for exim on the client:

http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/orei...exim_0701.html

alternatively you can use a stub replacement like ssmtp / esmtp / bsmtp which are NOT SMTP servers, but provide just the functionality to provide what the mail commands (and others) need to get rid of local mail, with a 5 line config tops...