Setting the root login's 'full name' to identify the machine that sent email

March 22, 2017

Yesterday I wrote about making sure you can identify what machine sent you a status email, and the comments Sotiris Tsimbonis shared a brilliant yet simple solution to this problem:

We change the gecos info for this purpose.

chfn -f "$HOSTNAME root" root

Take it from me; this is beautiful genius (so much so that both we and another group here immediately adopted it). It's so simple yet still extremely effective, because almost everything that sends email does so using programs like mail that will fill out the From: header using the login's GECOS full name from /etc/passwd. You get email that looks like:

From: root@<your-domain> (hebikera root)

This does exactly what we want by immediately showing the machine that the email is from. In fact many mail clients these days will show you only the 'real name' from the From: header by default, not the actual email address (I'm old-fashioned, so I see the traditional full From: header).

This likely works with any mail-sending program that doesn't require completely filled out email headers. It definitely works in the Postfix sendmail cover program for 'sendmail -t' (as well as the CentOS 6 and 7 mailx, which supplies the standard mail command).

(As an obvious corollary, you can also use this trick for any other machine-specific accounts that send email; just give them an appropriate GECOS 'full name' as well.)

There's two perhaps obvious cautions here. First, if you ever rename machines you have to remember to re-chfn the root login and any other such logins to have the correct hostname in them. It's probably worth creating an officially documented procedure for renaming machines, since there are other things you'll want to update as well (you might even script it). Second, if you have some sort of password synchronization system you need it to leave root's GECOS full name alone (although it can update root's password). Fortunately ours already does this.

Written on 22 March 2017.
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Last modified: Wed Mar 22 23:49:10 2017
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