Configuring periodic messages from FreeBSD servers

Per default, FreeBSD servers keep its system administrator informed about events from log files and results from periodic scripts. The information is regularly sent as electronic messages. However, the name of the sender of these electronic messages can be confusing, and, the recipient address might not be one, that is being read.

This procedure configures the name of the sender of these messages to a human friendly one and configures the recipient address to one, that is being read by a system administrator.

Configuring the name of the sender of the messages is done by updating the name of the root account in the password database. In the following example, the sender is changed to a combination of the name of the owner and the name of the server.

pw usermod root -c "Foobar Inc STARNIX"


Configuring the recipient address is done by editing the mail aliases configuration file, rebuild the database for mail aliases and test a restart of sendmail.

cd /etc/mail
nano -w aliases
root: sysadm@foobar.com
newaliases
make
make install
make restart