On Wed, Dec 23, 2009 at 11:37:22AM -0500, Chandler, Scott wrote:
> Thanks for the ideas but I really don't want to change my current
> config, it's working fine. 

It would seem that you need to reevaluate whether it really does work
fine...  What DSR says is correct: Berkeley mail (or its clones)
doesn't work the way you want.  It sends mail by forking off a copy of
/usr/sbin/sendmail on your system (or possibly some other preconfigured
path, depending on what flavor of Unix you're on), which uses (or
rather, *is*) the local SMTP server on your system to send out mail.

But this does solve your problem...  The Nagios box becomes the
"alternate SMTP server" that you're looking for.  You don't need to
run an SMTP daemon on the machine for this to work, either...  You
just need to make sure that a) it's configured properly to send
outgoing mail *directly* (i.e. not through a smart host or other
method of relaying through your main mail server), and b) that you've
set up aliases on the machine to send mail directly to your pagers.
Whenever mail is sent, the sendmail program that was spawned by mailx
will itself send the mail out, so you don't have to worry about the
daemon being down on that machine.

Then, the only problems you have are if the Nagios box itself goes
down, or if you lose your internet connection.  

As DSR suggests, if for some reason you need to keep that machine's
MTA configured the way it is, then you're going to have to install
another MTA in a different location, and configure it as above.  But
you're not going to get what you want by mucking with mailx command
line switches, regardless of whatever else you choose to do.

Hope that helps.

-- 
Derek D. Martin    http://www.pizzashack.org/   GPG Key ID: 0xDFBEAD02
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