Caution: Articles written for technical not grammatical accuracy, If poor grammar offends you proceed with caution ;-)
How would you like to kick off your ESX installation, then go have some coffee, go for a jog, or just hang out by the water cooler until it is finished without worrying if you’re wasting time while it’s waiting done and waiting for you. Well you can with this ESX email script. Incorporating this script as part of your ESX automated deployment script allows you to configure your server to email you once the post installation configuration is finished.
So what do you need to do? It simple you can get the mail_notify script that I found on yellow-bricks.com from our downloads page. Once you have the script you will need to get it on to your server along with the MIME Lite.pm file that you can download here. Once you download and extract the package you can find the Lite.pm file under /lib/MIME/ folder.
The take the Lite.pm file and the mail_notify.pl file and tar them together for easy retrieval. Then upload the mail_notify.tar file to your web server. Next include the following in your automated deployment script.
##### Setting up Mail Notification ########
echo Setting up mail notification
echo Setting up mail notification >> /var/log/post_install.log
cd /tmp
lwp-download http://[server ip]/path/mail_notify.tar
tar xvf mail_notify.tar
mkdir /usr/lib/perl5/5.8.0/MIME
mv Lite.pm /usr/lib/perl5/5.8.0/MIME/
##### Move the files to where they belong #######
mv mail_notify.pl /usr/local/bin/
chmod +x /usr/local/bin/mail_notify.pl
####### Let’s send an email that the install is finished #####
/usr/local/bin/mail_notify.pl -t youremail@yourdomain.com -s “Server installation complete” -a /var/log/post_install.log -m “Server Installation complete please review the attached log file to verify your server installed correctly” -r [your smtp server]
Optionally you could set the smtp server in the mail_notify.pl script and not have to specify when sending a mail message.
if you include this at the end of your post installation portion part of your script but before the EOF line you will get a nice email notification informing you that your installation has finished with the post_install.log file attached.