Sendmail takes ages to start at bootup

[John Summerfield]

Bob Kinney wrote:
> --- John Summerfield <debian at herakles.homelinux.org> wrote:
> 
>> Simon Slater wrote:
>>> 	Hi all,
>>>
>>> 		Just a question to satisfy my curiosity.  When booting sendmail takes
>>> a very long time to start.  This happens in FC6 but even longer in F7 on
>>> a new laptop.  I'm watching it now and its been 7 minutes so far.  Done!
>>> Sendmail finished in 9 minutes and now sm-client ... is ... finished
>>> in ... 4 minutes.  The rest boots quite quickly, less than 2 minutes for
>>> everything else.  All mail is done through another box.  This is not a
>>> problem, allows plenty of time to make some tea and get a slice of cake.
>>>
>> If you ever get tired of the opportunity to have morning tea and a 
>> natter while the computer gets started, you might get around to checking 
>> that networking is starting properly, you have fully functioning DNS or 
>>   an alternative.
>>
>> -- 
>>
>> Cheers
>> John
> 
> I have had that problem, too.  It seems that sendmail requires a complete
> hostname (with a domain) and sort of sits on its hands for a long time
> before timing out and continuing.
> 
> So in my case, I named the computer "name.localdomain", and updated the entry
> in /etc/hosts for my machine to 
> 127.0.0.1   name.localdomain name localhost.localdomain localhost
> where the last 3 items are aliases and thus will work for probably any
> program's needs.

except sending mail to other (especially remote) that expect the sender 
to comply with appropriate RFCs. If, on connecting to your sendmail 
using telnet, it announces itself as "localhost" then it's broken.



-- 

Cheers
John

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