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The goal is to achieve an outbound email notification when a cron job is run on my Drobo 5N NAS device. But, there does not appear to be any package installed such as mail, sendmail or ssmtp that would allow for outbound email.

I would prefer to send email using a Gmail account and it appears that SSMTP would be a good fit for that. However, neither apt-get, yum or pacman work from the shell and return "not found". I would install the package manually, but I am not even sure what version of Linux this box is running (e.g. Debian Squeeze, Arch, etc.).

When I issue the command:

$cat /proc/version

What is returned is:

Linux version 3.2.58-2 (root@buildtestserver3) (gcc version 4.4.5 20100614
(prerelease) (FSF GNU GCC branch-4.4.5. Marvell GCC 201106-257.a1ba7f96) )
#1 SMP Thu May 26 14:04:32 PDT 2016

And, the command:

$uname -mrs

returns:

Linux 3.2.58-2 armv7l

So,

  1. Is it possible to install the SSMTP package on this box? And,
  2. What's the appropriate SSMTP package to manually download? And lastly,
  3. How do I manually install it?

Thanks in advance for your contribution.

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  • "but I am not even sure what version of Linux this box is running (e.g. Debian Squeeze, Arch, etc.)." - It's none of the above, it appears to be a custom built version of the 3.2 kernel for ARMv71. Which is to be expected since it's a Drobo
    – Ramhound
    Jun 30, 2017 at 18:49
  • Hi @Ramhound, thank you for your insight. Does it necessarily follow that I must have a SSMTP package compiled specifically for this "custom built version of the 3.2 kernel for ARMv71"? Will a package from another version such as Debian, but is compatible with the ARMv71 architecture not work? Jun 30, 2017 at 19:08

2 Answers 2

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1) In principle, yes.

The Drobo is not a Debian system, so you can't use Debian packages. Not even ARM ones, because they will be compiled for different libraries.

Which means you either have to cross-compile, or find someone else who already cross-compiled it. Google turns up the Droboports site.

2) Looking at their app repository, there doesn't seem to be a ready-made MTA application.

Which means you pick whatever you think is simplest, first try to compile it yourself under Debian on your PC to get an idea how it works, and then your cross-compile using the tools provided.

3) Look around on the Drobo site, follow links like this, and see if you can get into contact with the Drobo community if you are stuck and can't figure out how to use the cross-compile tools.

4) Note that in principle you can also contact an MTA on a computer in your local network via cron on your Drobo. SMTP isn't that difficult to do. Though that's of course not as reliable as running an MTA directly on the Drobo.

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  • Thank you @dirkt. This points me in the right direction. Jul 1, 2017 at 14:50
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I was able to get outbound email working on the Drobo5n and it was a lot simpler than I thought it would be.

  1. From the Drobo Dashboard, install the Modoboa Mailserver app. This app installs Postfix as a dependency.
  2. Edit the file DroboApps/apache/conf/php.ini to add these 3 lines under the [PHP] section:

    sendmail_path="/mnt/DroboFS/Shares/DroboApps/mailserver/sbin/sendmail -t -i"  
    mail.add_x_header = On  
    mail.log = /mnt/DroboFS/Shares/DroboApps/apache/logs/mail.log
    
  3. Back in the Drobo Dashboard, stop and restart Apache. You're now good to go.

I created a simple php web page to test it.

<?php
    $to = "[email protected]";
    $subj = "this is the subject";
    $message = "This is a test email";
    $headers = "From: [email protected]";

    mail($to, $subj, $message, $headers);
?>

And within seconds, I received the email.

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