[4189] in RedHat Linux List
Re: Sendmail Delay Revisited (Colgate)
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Wayne Dyer)
Wed Nov 13 07:29:21 1996
Date: Wed, 13 Nov 1996 01:23:38 -0800
From: Wayne Dyer <dwdyer@eskimo.com>
To: redhat-list@redhat.com
In-Reply-To: <199611111340.WAA26415@mail.sphere.ad.jp>
Resent-From: redhat-list@redhat.com
Reply-To: redhat-list@redhat.com
Lance Cummings sez:
> My experience with the sendmail delay:
[...]
> The office machine has limited space, so I do a minimal install.
> The home machine has more space, so I click "everything."
This is a sign of geekdom only if the reason for this is that you have
a larger hard drive at home. ;-) (My Mac at work has a 270 MB hard drive,
I use two 1.6GB's at home for Linux & Win95.)
> Re the sendmail boot delay: On the office machine simply
> entering a name in hostname in the configurator eliminates
> that delay completely. Gone. NO other modifications made.
> It's the first and only thing I did -- just to try it. Then I
> rebooted.
>
> On the home machine, No amount of modification -- adding
> hostname and/or domain name or anything else -- gets rid of the
> sendmail delay for me, which runs about 90 seconds or so.
[...]
I fixed mine. Finally. I did two things, so it could be one or the
other or both. I routinely boot with an ISP configuration where
I have a static IP address and domain name. Sendmail starts when it
can't access DNS, as diald hasn't come up yet. My hostname locally
has nothing to do with that domain name or any other I might get
when using a different ISP.
I had the hang until I:
1. Changed things so that /etc/hosts reads like so at boot time:
127.0.0.1 localhost loopback
127.0.0.2 fizzbaby dwdyer.ndip.eskimo.net dwdyer
(fizzbaby is the whimsical hostname, dwdyer.ndip.eskimo.net is the
fqdn of the static IP address I've been assigned. 127.0.0.2 is the
fake IP address I use on my end when starting PPP -- even though
I know the IP number, I don't assume it. I use ip-up to rewrite this
file with the link-time addresses.)
2. Changed things so that parts of /etc/sendmail.cf read like so
at boot time:
# my official domain name
# ... define this only if sendmail cannot automatically determine your domain
Djdwdyer.ndip.eskimo.net
> 2) What package is causing the sendmail delay, and is it a
> package I really need? My home computer will likely never
> be networked. It will connect to an ISP, however. I hate
> that delay. When I saw how fast my office machine can boot
> Linux, it blew my mind.
It is sendmail and your network configuration. One quick and easy fix
if you don't want to mess with sendmail for outbound mail (e.g., you
plan to use something like XFMail, Netscape, etc. to send it directly
to your ISP) is to uninstall sendmail altogether and install the smail
package from the contrib directory. It's smaller, and it comes configured
so that local mail (cron to root, etc) will still get through, with no
boot delay or wild*ss DNS lookups for name canonization because it's set
up OOB for UUCP. Which you can ignore.
I did this until I decided to indulge my masochistic tendencies with
sendmail. Now all I need to know is: is it safe to shut off name
canonization or will mail to wierd MX sites go nuts?
--
Wayne Dyer :: dwdyer@eskimo.com :: http://www.eskimo.com/~dwdyer/
"Never stay up on the barren heights of cleverness, but come down
into the green valleys of silliness. " -- Wittgenstein
--
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