ipmiutil_wdt causes per minute email spam and log clutter.

[Harry Coin]

The ipmiutil_wdt watchdog service, under wily, after being enabled by
systemctl enable ipmiutil_wdt
causes one line per minute to be entered into /var/log/syslog, and
causes the output of ipmiutil wdt -e -t 90 to be emailed to root every minute.

That's so much clutter it's beyond 'nuisance' level and rates being called 'bug'.

As a not-very-good workaround stopgap:

To fix the syslog clutter:

/etc/init/cron.override
exec cron -L 4

Which causes only cron scripts that end in error to be logged. This is a bad idea because it affects notices of all cron runs.

To fix the mail spam clutter:

Also edit ipmiutil_wdt to cause the 'wdt' file created in /etc/crontab.d to add
MAILTO=''
before the cron line, and then append to the cron line:
> $prog.lastrun 2&>1

This puts the result of the last watchdog reset into a file, the file timestamp will tell when it was run.

Only under the most unusual of debugging circumstances would anyone want to know about watchdog timer resets other than the most recent.

Why not manage this watchdog matter by a permanent high priority once-per-minute daemon, avoiding the use of cron altogether?

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

This bug was fixed in the package ipmiutil - 2.9.9-1

---------------
ipmiutil (2.9.9-1) unstable; urgency=medium

  * New upstream release.
  * Refresh patches.
  * debian/control:
    - Correct Vcs-Git.
    - Bump Standards-Version to 3.9.8 (no changes required).
  * New debian/patches/0705-crontab.patch (LP: #1535408):
    - Prevent running watchdog to send mails and log entries every minute.

 -- Jörg Frings-Fürst <email address hidden> Sun, 15 May 2016 23:06:42 +0200