Thanks Jeff, I didn't think of those alternatives.  They could

work out better, and be easier to set up, I'm all up for that!

-----Original Message----- From: Jeff Stoner [mailto:stoners at verizon.net] Sent: Thursday, November 10, 2005 9:42 PM To: hobbit at hswn.dk Subject: Re: [hobbit] Web page to subscribe to Hobbit email alerts

On Wed, 2005-11-09 at 16:46 -0500, Maschino, Shawn (GE Advanced

        Hello follow Hobbit admins (hobmins?).  I'm fairly new to

the list but have been running Hobbit for a while now. I've had a request come to me to put a web page together to let people register for getting Hobbit email alerts. It would just need to allow someone to select a server (or servers), the tests they want alerts for, and then enter their email address. When they submit the form it would automatically add a line in hobbit-alerts.cfg so they would get the alerts.

It would probably be much easier to manage this through your mailer than with Hobbit. A couple thoughts:

• have script edit the /etc/mail/aliases (or whatever your mail handling program uses)
• set up a user account, configure procmail with that account then have your script modify that

Considerations:

1. The first approach above would possibly require root privs somewhere along the line (either modifying the file or rebuilding the aliases database) Again, this depends entirely on your mail handling software.

2. Approach number 2 helps isolate failures with malformed email addresses to the procmail facility. When Hobbit gets an alert, it will never be adversely affected by a bad email address. Procmail might so you need to be careful writing the .procmailrc file.

3. Editing the hobbit-alerts.cfg directly from a cgi script leaves you vulnerable. People screw up. If they screw up bad enough, they could really futz up your alerting which would be a really Bad Thing(tm) all around. Avoid doing this if possible, especially when you may not know who is utilizing your system.

A better solution would be to use a listserv. There are several mailing list software packages out there that can be employed...which would provide:

• possibly a web interface already exists for people to subscribe/unsucscribe (why reinvent the wheel?)
• the ability to make a moderated list so people couldn't spam everyone else unnecessarily (think: Out of Office notices or bounce messages)
• archiving of the alerts for auditing purposes
• more clear division between alerting by Hobbit and mail handling by the list software

Choose your fate.

-- --Jeff "Go to Jail. Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200."

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