How to send file to external server

First off, I am an intern for a large company, and I have a project that I would like to be successful at, but I ran into a roadblock and want to know if anyone has any ideas.

Very simply my project is this:
1) Gather information from a remote linux server
- This will be a script that will be installed on the remote server that runs as a cron job to gather certain information about the users environment
2) Send the information to our in-house linux mail server (this is what I need help with)
3) Do some processing on the sent data

So I started off, and right away assumed I would send this information using 'sendmail' through the linux command line, but today I found out that our remote servers do not have 'sendmail'. The servers are running a linux shell, but I believe it is a in-house product. It would be a possibility to get 'sendmail' installed, but due to the size and nature of the project, it would probably be a year or two before that would actually happen, and I would like to have something to show before my internship ends.
Does anyone have any suggestions, or know a very basic way to send information to a server out of the network?
I am wondering if this is possible with SMTP using a very stripped down package that has nothing but the ability to send a packet.

Feel free to suggest any ideas! Obviously the more detail you can give, the better, but I am not afraid to do research and get my hands dirty if you can give me even some general pointers.

Thanks everyone! I look forward to becoming active in this community!

> send info to server

have you tried sftp? Suppose you have a login on the
server, and it has ip address a.b.c.d then

"sftp a.b.c.d"

should get you connected. See "man sftp" for what then

Check to see if they have postfix installed, it's a very common mailer. This should help since you can't use sendmail.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by tpl

> send info to server

have you tried sftp? Suppose you have a login on the
server, and it has ip address a.b.c.d then

"sftp a.b.c.d"

should get you connected. See "man sftp" for what then

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It does have sftp, so I will give it a look and see what I find, thanks.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by MikeTbob

Check to see if they have postfix installed, it's a very common mailer. This should help since you can't use sendmail.

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No postfix either, in fact, this is so basic it doesn't even have man :eek: Thanks anyway though

It's hard to believe a Linux server has no mail service whatsoever. How this server reports problems? It got to have something, probably it's configured to accept mail locally only. In this case it's a matter of reconfiguring.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Segfault

It's hard to believe a Linux server has no mail service whatsoever. How this server reports problems? It got to have something, probably it's configured to accept mail locally only. In this case it's a matter of reconfiguring.

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Well it is a server for a specific product, and that is all the customers use it for. It is not possible to reconfigure the server, as it is property of the customer. I suppose it would be possible to reconfigure future versions before they are shipped, I just wanted to see if anyone knew of a way that I was missing. I cannot reconfigure the server or install new programs.

The problem with ssh is that I cannot make it non-interactive without special software, and that software is not installed on the servers.
The server does not have telnet.
I am going to look into ftp, but is it non-interactive?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by webbie_colt

Ftp requires human intervention in that you have to type in the commands, I guess
that means that it is interactive. But ftp tasks can be automated using shell scripts,
that implies they can be used without human intervention.

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Alright thanks, that is pretty much what I needed to know. Cheers