This program works in contrast to alert with both, sockserv and servsock. It receives
alerts via the unix domain socket if the HighWater mark of queued
alerts in sockserv or
servsock are reached.
The primary idea of this program is to keep at least minimal informations about alerts. If there are too many alerts buffered some processes could fail due to memory shortage. So there should be a mechanism to drop some alerts to keep the buffer size limited. These alerts will not be inserted in the database but are mailed to a list of recipients.
If the progam fails to send the emails it tries it again later. This
is done up to five times. This number can be adjusted via the command
line option -M or the
MaxCount keyword.
If it is not possible to send an email during this time the
program writes the content of this email to
stdout. Another process should inform an operator
about this problem. In contrast to alert does this program not
exit, it simply continues to work.