Using Gmail to keep track of your Linux System

I've been trying to find an easy way to keep track of what my debian system was doing while I was away from home for a little while now. One idea I had involved having my computer send status updates (with a package called logcheck and using cron job reports) via email to my gmail account. That way I could login to the account from anywhere, and check to see if my system was still in working order. To do this, I had to configure exim4 (the default mailing agent on Debian) and my gmail account. First off, I reconfigured my exim4 program using:

dpkg-reconfigure exim4-config

In the settings, I chose to relay via smarthost, but did not select to recieve email locally via fetchmail. After that I edited the template config file for exim4:

nano /etc/exim4/exim4.conf.template

and added the following:

remote_smtp_smarthost:
debug_print = "T: remote_smtp_smarthost for $local_part@$domain"
driver = smtp
# hosts_try_auth = ${if exists {CONFDIR/passwd.client}{DCsmarthost}{}}
tls_tempfail_tryclear = false
hosts_require_auth = smtp.gmail.com
hosts_require_tls = smtp.gmail.com
port = 587

Comment the line out above, and add what isn't already in the file. After that I ran

update-exim4.conf

to propogate any changes that I had made. Finally, I added the following lines to the "/etc/exim4/passwd.client" file:

smtp.gmail.com:username@gmail.com:password
gmail-smtp.l.google.com:username@gmail.com:password

Replace username and password in the above two lines with your own info. After that I used a program called MUTT to send out a test email to my gmail account to see if it worked. Sure enough there was an email from myself in the inbox... Finally I configured logcheck and crontab to send email to my gmail account by adding my email address to their respective config files.

For reference, I found most of the info in this debian mailing list posting. Enjoy!