[H-GEN] Can procmail trigger a script?

[Bruce Campbell]

On Sun, 11 Dec 2005, Harry Phillips wrote:

> Bruce Campbell wrote:
>> 
>> Personally, I'm more of the opinion that the MTA's responsibility is to 
>> deliver the mail, and let cron-triggered/daemonised programs do serious 
>> cpu/disk-bound activity with the resulting mail files.  Allowing an outside 
>> agency control the load on your server is not a good thing, and has a nasty 
>> tendency to keep you up at nights.
>
> So it would be better to just let the freshclam daemon to run and forget it?

'Better' depends on your constraints.

For instance, if this is on a home server which has a dial-on-demand 
connection, I'd be inclined to have a frequently-invoked cron script that 
checks for an existing connection before invoking the update daemon, with 
a few other bells and whistles to ensure that it only gets an update once 
per day.

Or to pick another end of the spectrum, if it was a corporate mail server 
with lots of suspect mail clients behind it, I'd be subscribed to the 
update list in order to trigger the update daemon (along with a regular 
cron update overnight), and I'd stop all delivery of client mail whilst 
the update is going on, in case the announcement is 'just' preceding the 
virus propagation wave.  Generous[1] people may wish to trigger a queue 
run once the update had finished.

You've asked a question which depends on a lot of variables external to 
this thread, most of which we do not know[2].  The mark of a good admin is 
knowing what the contraints are, and finding a solution that works with 
the least amount of intervention for those constraints.

--==--
Bruce.

[1] Definition subject to change.
[2] Thats not an invitation to expound upon them mind.