Maintaining ALIASes on Sirsi Unicorn Servers for emailing reports

• the /Bin/mailfile which is "superceded" by our/Bincustom/mailfile uses the Unix mail command to email finished reports to addresses. This file MUST be in place for aliases to work!!!

• since the "ADMIN" user is always used to email finished reports out, the ADMIN user's "home" is where alias's are setup
  • the directory of the ADMIN home is /home/admin and can be immediately found by simply typing "cd" when you get into the shell
  • now to edit the file with the aliases, you have to su to admin (since you are currently admin but working under a setuid as sirsi) so here are the steps:

    Select the utility you want to use:
    
       1) Backup           6) Report          11) Terminaltype
       2) Computeradmin    7) Sh              12) Unicornadmin
       3) Import_export    8) Spinelabels     13) Updategui
       4) Logs             9) Standalone      14) Updatewsdisk
       5) Mailbox         10) Systemconfig    15) Wsclient
    
    Type       HELP for help,
               EXIT to quit UNICORN Utilities,
      or   a NUMBER.
    
    [] sh
    $ cd
    $ pwd
    /home/admin
    $ whoami 
    sirsi
    $ who am i
    admin       pts/3       Feb 07 08:05    (pc27-240.lib.uca)
    
    $ su admin
    admin's Password: 
    $ ls -eat *
    -rw-r--r---   1 admin    sirsi      47096 Jan 30 13:42 dead.letter
    -rw--------   1 admin    sirsi     115550 Jan 30 13:32 mbox
    -rw-r--r---   1 admin    sirsi          0 Dec 24 1999  core
    -rw-r------   1 admin    sirsi      72478 Dec 10 1996  analog.lp
    -rw-r--r---   1 admin    system       201 Dec 04 1995  tmp
    
    $ ls -eat .mai*
    -rw-r--r---   1 admin    sirsi        638 Feb 06 14:31 .mailrc
    $ more .mailrc
    
    
    
    
    
    alias cash lewallac@ucalgary.ca sblazina@ucalgary.ca mpereira@ucalgary.ca wilson
    m@ucalgary.ca johnson@ucalgary.ca harlamow@ucalgary.ca semple@ucalgary.ca ddean@
    ucalgary.ca mlukowic@ucalgary.ca jdauter@ucalgary.ca
    alias circ1 ddean@ucalgary.ca johnson@ucalgary.ca mlukowic@ucalgary.ca cmurrell@
    ucalgary.ca nash@ucalgary.ca tiessen@ucalgary.ca sudak@ucalgary.ca wilsonm@ucalg
    ary.ca
    alias circ2 koprek@ucalgary.ca matheson@ucalgary.ca lewallac@ucalgary.ca sblazin
    a@ucalgary.ca harlamow@ucalgary.ca ilmorgan@ucalgary.ca mpereira@ucalgary.ca
    

  • You can vi the .mailrc file to change the current aliases or add new ones

  • NOTE: circ1 and circ2 are both used to mail out the statforcirc monthly report but since there are 15 email addresses, it was broken into two groups so that the unix command line limit of 256 was not reached. In these cases with lots of people receiving the SAME report, the report runner actually MAILs the finished report out to the first group and then MAILs the same finished report out to the second group ie. once out to circ1 and another mail process to circ2.

  ---

• Automatic emailing of the finished reports can be configured in the Module configuration but then the SIRSI user is emailing out the reports then (not ADMIN).

• This automatic emailing of a report, as it runs and is put on the finished report list, is controlled by the two programs /Unicorn/Bin/automail and mailfile. I have created a new /Unicorn/Bincustom/mailfile which allows for a sender's email other than sirsi@neter.lib.ucalgary.ca to be the "reply" to address. I also created logging so that we can see the date and who sent a report to who in /Unicorn/Bincustom/mailfile.ran (just like we log the automatic emailing of notices in emailntc.ran)

• The SIRSI user is a $HOME is /sirsi/s/sirsi found via logging on as SIRSI and doing a echo $HOME.

• I setup a .mailrc file in this directory but that did not properly get the automatic emailed finished report to me (the target of the alias I had setup), instead the return address I used received a bounced email saying that it didn't know the alias name I had setup.

• NOTE: that the report owner was ADMIN and the admin user did have a .mailrc file too in the /home/admin directory with the alias I was trying to use so I submitted it to the helpdesk as UCAP-T 53840.
• I then assumed that the alias for SIRSI user would have to go right in the mail file for the server in /usr/share/lib/Mail.rc which takes root access, so that is where I gave up.

• Just for information, the "mail" on the server is filed as:
  • inbox is in /var/spool/mail/....(admin or sirsi) etc.

  • rcvd mail is in /home/admin/mbox (or appropriate /home/(user)/mbox)

  • dead.letter is for messages that user tried to email out from the server but that did not successfully reach their destination

  
  

  
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