Connect to an SMTP Server

The Altair Accelerator products include a facility for emailing notifications of events that require attention, such as Monitor sending notifications of license daemons that are down or licenses that are checked out for long periods of time. The vovnotifyd daemon (Notification Daemon) is responsible for sending out notifications.

A program that sends out email will connect with an outbound SMTP server that handles the send-email request.

You will need to configure the connection to the SMTP server before the outbound email will work. The SMTP server configuration supports the Notification Daemon's ability to send email.

Web-based Configuration

Using the browser interface, you can configure the SMTP server by visiting the administration page for the Notification Daemon. Enter the URL: http://<host>/cgi/notify.cgi

This page has three navigation links along the top so you can navigate to the Health Checks page, the SMTP Configuration page, and the E-Mail Maps page.

If visiting this page for the first time, click Enable Notification Subsystem to enable email notification for this project. This step creates the <project>.swd/vovnotifyd directory and the required configuration file, then displays the SMTP Configuration page.

Before configuring the health checks, the SMTP configuration needs to be established so that email can be sent from the Notification Daemon.


Figure 1. SMTP Configuration Page

Fill out the server settings form with the values that will enable a connection with a local SMTP server, save, then send a test mail to confirm that the configuration is correct and that mail can be sent.

In some environments, the user name that is used to login to the Altair Accelerator is not used as the user's email address. For these situations, fill in the User E-Mail Maps page with the user-name-to-email-address mappings. This page is available by navigation link from the Notification Configuration page.


Figure 2. Email Map Page

File-based Configuration

The main configuration file for vovnotifyd is the <project>.swd/vovnotifyd/config.tcl file. A complete, documented example file exists in the installation tree in the common/etc/config/vovnotifyd subdirectory of the installation root: 
# Notification configuration file.
# Should be placed in the vovnotifyd directory of the .swd.
# All settings are required unless specified otherwise.
# Unused optional settings should be commented out.

# Create an e-mail address map, stackable, optional
addUserToEmailAddressMap  rtdamgr john@mydomain.com

### Altair Monitor-specific settings
# See notification configuration documentation in Monitor Admin guide
# ConfigureTag     TAG OPTION VALUE
# ConfigureFeature FEATURE OPTION VALUE

### Examples:
# ConfigureTag MGC -poc { john mary }
# ConfigureFeature EDA/MATLAB -longcheckout 2d -userlongcheckout john 1w -mincap 5 -triggerperc 90
# ConfigureFeature SIMULINK -poc bob -mincap 10 -triggeruse 12

Debugging an SMTP Connection

If the notification configuration does not appear to work, vovnotifyd can be launched in the foreground with increased output verbosity, to aid in debugging the configuration. To do this, first shut down the daemon, then:
% vovproject enable <project>
% cd `vovserverdir -p vovnotifyd`
% vovnotifyd -v -v
The configuration is stored on properties, which can be inspected with the following:
% vovproject enabme <project>
% vovprop list 1 | grep NOTIFY_