News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

Ask HN: How do you check if your mailserver is still running?

I'm running my own mail server with postfix and dovecot on a VPS. From time to time I'm scared that the server might be down, especially, if I do not get an email for some time. At the moment I'm just sending myself an e-mail from gmail to check wether its running. Does someone know a service which texts me or sends a push notification?
( 4 comments | 6 points | on HN )
Re:Ask HN: How do you check if your mailserver is still runn... by simon_acca on Saturday January 07, 2017 @04:48PM (#13346828)
You could use uptimerobot[0] to monitor your server's SMTP port and alert you on telegram/sms/whatever.

Sure that's not a guarantee that mail actually gets trough, but I think there's no shortcut for that other than sending an actual mail from an external service and checking its delivery.

[0]: http://uptimerobot.com

Re:Ask HN: How do you check if your mailserver is still runn... by riffic on Saturday January 07, 2017 @02:29PM (#13346047)
>Does someone know a service which texts me or sends a push notification?

Nagios, Pagerduty :)

You can find more resources here:

https://github.com/kahun/awesome-sysadmin

Re:Ask HN: How do you check if your mailserver is still runn... by speedy1034 on Saturday January 07, 2017 @04:09PM (#13346651)
Maybe I'm wrong, but Pagerduty could be used to ping me, once I do know that the server is not running properly, right? I could use it to ping me if my mail server does not send any logs. This would help in some scenarios.

I thought there might be a service that sends an email to a special account or the answer is forwarded to themselves. If they don't get the forwarded message they send a text message.

Re:Ask HN: How do you check if your mailserver is still runn... by rootme on Saturday January 07, 2017 @01:11PM (#13345586)
Send 1 email