Monitoring a Lenovo ThinkServer, with Help from Cygwin

The box is running Windows 2008 Server Foundation, which is a bare bone of Windows server software. But it works for a small business that has software that only runs on Windows.

The Lenove ThinkServer 100 series support an Intel SATA RAID controller. To monitor the RAID system, one may install the Intel Storage Management Console as described in this manual on page 10.

But there is a problem. Windows 2008 Server Foundation does not come with a mail server. The Storage Management Console is only capable of sending out notification of any issue in the storage system via plain vanilla SMTP (Simple Mail Transport Protocol), with no support for a smart-host kind of configuration.

Here is where Cygwin and its arsenal of software carried over from the UNIX/Linux world can help. I did not start out knowing what to do exactly. But simple Google search of Cygwin SMTP proxy turns up a lot of reading material. By the way, Cygwin should be on every Windows machine, just for packages like grep, openssh and rsync that comes with it if nothing else.

Following this article about running exim on Ubuntu to send email via Gmail, I have been able to get it up and running in short order. Installing exim is not very difficult. As of this writing, Cygwin comes with exim version 4.76-1. After installation, one runs exim-config to configure it.

There are things that need to be further configured. The line below to add the local network for mail relay:

hostlist   relay_from_hosts = 127.0.0.1 : 192.168.1.0/24

 To route mail not for local domains via Gmail:

begin routers
send_via_gmail:
        driver = manualroute
        domains = ! +local_domains
        transport = gmail_smtp
        route_list = * smtp.gmail.com

 To configure the Gmail SMTP service:

begin transports
gmail_smtp:
        driver = smtp
        port = 587
        hosts_require_auth = $host_address
        hosts_require_tls = $host_address

 Gmail SMTP server requires user authentication:

begin authenticators
gmail_login:
        driver = plaintext
        public_name = LOGIN
        client_send = : your-account@gmail.com : your-account-password

That's it! After that, start the exim service using net start exim. From the Intel Storage Management Console, one may then configure it to use the local server as the SMTP server to send out email when issues occur.