F9 - sendmail won't send on startup?

[Craig White]

On Sun, 2008-06-22 at 12:48 -0700, Knute Johnson wrote:
> Craig White wrote:
> > On Sun, 2008-06-22 at 12:17 -0700, Knute Johnson wrote:
> >> Craig White wrote:
> >>> On Sun, 2008-06-22 at 12:02 -0700, Knute Johnson wrote:
> >>>> Knute Johnson wrote:
> >>>>> That didn't fix it.  The mail got queued though which is another problem 
> >>>>> that occurs sometimes along with this.  As soon as I restart sendmail 
> >>>>> these queued mails are sent immediately.
> >>>>>
> >>>>> [root at knute knute]# mailq
> >>>>>         /var/spool/mqueue (2 requests)
> >>>>> -----Q-ID----- --Size-- -----Q-Time----- 
> >>>>> ------------Sender/Recipient-----------
> >>>>> m5MItEsf002625       52 Sun Jun 22 11:55 <linux at www.knutejohnson.com>
> >>>>>                  (Deferred: Name server: www.knutejohnson.com.: host 
> >>>>> name look)
> >>>>>                      <linux at www.knutejohnson.com>
> >>>>> m5MIrQFK002822       52 Sun Jun 22 11:53 <linux at www.knutejohnson.com>
> >>>>>                  (Deferred: Name server: www.knutejohnson.com.: host 
> >>>>> name look)
> >>>>>                      <linux at www.knutejohnson.com>
> >>>>>         Total requests: 2
> >>>>>
> >>>> These extra emails are problems with the mailq (I think).
> >>> ----
> >>> I'm out...I abandoned sendmail for postfix years ago. A suggestion
> >>> though...set up a server on your lan to handle relaying all outbound
> >>> mail and use an smtp connection to that server instead of relying upon
> >>> the local /usr/bin/sendmail binary. That pretty much solves the issue of
> >>> configuring each workstation to handle mail deliveries.
> >>>
> >>> Craig
> >>>
> >> There are a million ways around the problem, but I'd really just like to 
> >> fix it.
> >>
> >> Thanks for trying though.
> > ----
> > I feel that you missed my point.
> > 
> > If you are going to rely upon configuring sendmail on each machine on
> > your LAN to deliver e-mail, you need to have working DNS and some
> > knowledge on how to configure sendmail. That's what's required to fix
> > it. You are choosing your own burdens here.
> > 
> > Craig
> > 
> 
> I understand you perfectly.  However there is no DNS problem as I can 
> read mail from the server, the browser works and I can ping.  There is 
> some new problem with F9 that is causing this or something that works 
> differently on F9.  This has worked fine on every version of Fedora 
> since 1 and it works fine as soon as I restart sendmail.
----
But I am running F-9 and sendmail and don't get those startup errors...

[root at lin-workstation ~]# grep 'Name server timeout' /var/log/maillog*
[root at lin-workstation ~]# grep 'Name server timeout' /var/log/messages*
[root at lin-workstation ~]# chkconfig --list sendmail
sendmail        0:off   1:off   2:on    3:on    4:on    5:on    6:off

so it seems as though you do have some DNS problem somewhere.

And I assure you that if there was an inherent problem with mail
delivery on Fedora-9, we'd be hearing plenty of moaning.

but since I have a server on the LAN that handles mail delivery (both on
the LAN and to the Internet), it's a waste of time for me to configure
each local system to deliver e-mail when all I need to do is just use my
server for smtp connections and if necessary, simply configure a
workstation to use my server as a smarthost.

Thus when I see you using e-mail addresses with zones (www) and errors
resolving them, it seems to me that it's simply errors caused by your
configuration which seems to be unnecessarily complicated and requires
that you notch up your troubleshooting capabilities.

I recall that on Fedora 8, NetworkManager sysv init ran rather late in
the startup series but checking it out now, it starts much earlier and
certainly before SendMail so that shouldn't pose a problem (which is why
I suggested putting an entry in /etc/hosts).

Craig