One of the last things I had to do after imaging the system OS drive with Clonezilla, was to start a fresh backup with dar.  So, I manually started my custom script around midnight, and let it run.  When I woke up, I checked my email, and there wasn’t a backup email.  Curious.  So, I checked if it was still running.  Nope, was finished, but it choked and halted at the point of sending the email.

So, I discovered that there was no Mail Transport Agent installed, so HOW could the command ‘mail’ send any mail?  😉  So, using yum, I installed postfix.  Then, went through /etc/postfix/main.cf and using nano  (as root user) added a few basic things like hostname and domain.  I don’t think that there was much anything else that I had to edit.  So, time to start postfix.

# service postfix restart

The line in my backup script still refused to send out mail.  So, discovered that for some reason, postfix didn’t like my use of -a (attachment).  Had to change the line around like this:

mail -s Auto_Backup_SYS -a /mnt/storage/backupsys.txt -c >/dev/null

mail -s Auto_Backup_SYS -c < /mnt/storage/backupsys.txt >/dev/null

No big deal, since the status file is a text file, but I really don’t know why the -a flag was a show stopper.  While I was at it, I fixed a couple more vhosts for my friend, Don Landes.  Mental note – I really need to clean up the vhosts conf directory, as there are a few in there that aren’t used any longer.  That also means removing the ‘includes’ from the /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf file, but that can wait for another day.  😉