Logwatch

Logwatch keeps an eye on the logs files, flags items that may be of interest, and reports them via email. It might be useful in monitoring the state of our VPS and that of the applications that we install.

1. Install msmtp

1. Let's make sure first that we have the right packages installed:

   #apt purge mailutils mailutils-common
   #apt autoremove
   apt install \
       msmtp msmtp-mta bsd-mailx

2. Create the config file /etc/msmtprc:

   cat << _EOF_ > /etc/msmtprc
   account smtp
   maildomain user1.fs.al
   host smtp.user1.fs.al
   from mycloud@user1.fs.al
   tls_starttls on
   set_from_header on
   
   account default : smtp
   aliases /etc/aliases.msmtp
   syslog LOG_MAIL
   _EOF_
   
   nano /etc/msmtprc

3. Create the config file /etc/aliases.msmtp, like this:

   cat << _EOF_ > /etc/aliases.msmtp
   default: dashohoxha@gmail.com
   _EOF_
   
   nano /etc/aliases.msmtp

   All emails from the system will be forwarded to the default address. It can also be a comma separated list of addresses.

4. Let's test it:

   mail --help
   mail -s Test1 -- root <<< "Test 1"

2. Setup logwatch

1. Install it:

   apt install --yes logwatch libdate-manip-perl

2. Create config file /etc/logwatch/conf/logwatch.conf:

   cat << _EOF_ > /etc/logwatch/conf/logwatch.conf
   Range = between -7 days and -1 days
   _EOF_

   Run it for the last 7 days.

3. Make it run weekly, instead of daily:

   ls /etc/cron.daily/
   mv /etc/cron.daily/00logwatch /etc/cron.weekly/

4. Test it:

   nano /etc/cron.weekly/00logwatch
   /etc/cron.weekly/00logwatch

   Check the mailbox for the mail sent by logwatch.

3. Enable logwatch for containers

For container that we install with docker-scripts, we can install msmtp and logwatch like this:

cmd_config() {
    # . . . . .
    ds inject msmtp.sh
    ds inject logwatch.sh
    # . . . . .
}

The injected scripts logwatch.sh and msmtp.sh are defined by the framework itself:

cd /opt/docker-scripts/ds/
nano src/inject/msmtp.sh
nano src/inject/logwatch.sh

If you look at the code of these scripts, you will notice that:

1. They load variables both from global settings and local setting, like this:

   # load global settings
   global_settings=$(dirname $0)/global_settings.sh
   [[ -f $global_settings ]] && source $global_settings
   
   # load local settings
   source /host/settings.sh

2. They use variables like: SMTP_SERVER, SMTP_DOMAIN, SMTP_PORT, LOGWATCH_EMAIL etc.

These variables are stored at the global settings file, because they are usually the same for all the containers, but may also be overridden at the local settings file of a container, if needed.

The global settings file is located at $DSDIR/global_settings.sh (which is by default ~/.ds/global_settings.sh).

To enable msmtp and logwatch for our containers, we should define these variables at ~/.ds/global_settings.sh:

cat << _EOF_ >> ~/.ds/global_settings.sh
SMTP_SERVER="smtp.user1.fs.al"
SMTP_DOMAIN="user1.fs.al"
#SMTP_PORT=25
LOGWATCH_EMAIL=dashohoxha@gmail.com
_EOF_

note

We have to rebuild the containers (usually with ds make), so that these changes are enabled:

ls /var/ds/

app_list="nsd revproxy mariadb wordpress1"
for app in $app_list; do
    cd /var/ds/$app/
    ds make
done