ipfstatusmail

Status emails for IPFire

Provides a service to send emails containing information about the status of an IPFire installation. The contents of the emails and the schedule that they are sent on can be defined on a WUI. The emails can be encrypted with GPG.

The encrypted emails can be decrypted with Thunderbird + Enigmail on Linux and K-9 Mail + OpenKeychain on Android. Other clients haven't been tested.

To install

1. Download the installer:

wget https://github.com/timfprogs/ipfstatusmail/raw/master/install-statusmail.sh

2. Make it executable:

chmod +x install-statusmail.sh

3. Run the installer:

./install-statusmail.sh

The installer will download the files and install them in the correct places. You can now go to the WUI (under 'IPFire') and configure the addon.

Configuration

1. Make sure you've got the IPFire mail service configured and working (under 'System > Mail Service').

2. Create a signing key by clicking on the 'Generate' button.

3. If necessary, create an encryption key in your email client. You can use an existing key.

4. Import the signing key into your email client.

5. Export the encryption public key from your email client and paste it into the Encryption Key box. Click on the 'Import' button. The key will be imported and shown in the list of installed keys. It will also be added to the the list of contacts. Repeat as necessary for additional enryption keys.

6. It is possible to add additional contacts without encryption keys. This is not recommended for security reasons.

7. Enable the contacts by clicking on the checkbox against the contact's details. Disabling contacts allows emails to be stopped from going to a person during holidays while still allowing other people to continue to receive emails.

8. Create schedules. Each schedule defines the contents of an email message that is sent to one or more contacts, the schedule for sending the message, and the type of the message.

• Name Schedule name. Used in the list of schedules.

• Email subject The subject field in the email.

• Send email to The recipients of the email. Multiple recipients can be selected.

• Email format Text or HTML. The items available to be sent in the email may differ.

• Period covered Defines the period of data contained in the email. Not all items use these fields.

• Lines per item Limits the number of lines of data contained in a single item. Not all items use this field.

• Days of Month and Days of Week Defines the days that the email will be sent. Only one of these options needs to be set - they are OR'd together. At least one checkbox must be selected from these two sets.

• Hours Defines the time of day that the email will be sent. At least one checkbox must be selected.

  The remaining fields define the contents of the email.

9. Enable the schedule.

Notes

Amount of output

A schedule can produce a large amount of data and it's possible to get the data sent frequently. This doesn't mean it's a good idea. For example it's possible to set up a schedule that once an hours sends an analysis of all blocked ip packets from the last year. This is unlikely to be useful.

A better idea would be to set up a schedule to send just enough data to see if the system is working correctly. If you spot an error you can then log into the system for further analysis.

Event reporting

If there's no information generated for an item, then that item is not added to the message. If there are no items added to the message then it will not get sent. You can use this to set up a schedule that checks for errors and important events and reports them only if they're found. For example:

Section	Subsection	Item	Parameter	Value
Services	Clam AV	Alerts
Services	Intrusion Detection System	Alerts	Minimum Priority	1
Network	Firewall	IP address	Minimum count	50
System	Kernel	Errors
System	ssh	Errors
System	ssh	Logins

Under normal circumstances these items should all be empty, so if you set up a schedule containing these items that's scheduled for every hour, you won't get an email unless one of these items occurs.