[ale] sendmail question

[Lex Spoon]

Well, because of the pause you describe, I would think it certainly
could be a hostname lookup timing out.  Have you tried changing the
hostname back an rebooting?

You might check /var/log/*, and see if sendmail is thoughtful
enough to actually tell you what its problem is; this is one nice
thing about Linux--when programs are unhappy, they tend to give info
that is useful for debugging.  Just think of the whole concept of a
core dump.

Anyway, maybe sendmail can only use DNS, but your new hostname only
appears in /etc/hosts?  Or perhaps, you use a local named, but
sendmail is getting started before named does?  Or perhaps the DNS
info for the new hostname is only available over a PPP connection, which
at boot time has not been established yet?

If you are visibly seeing the bootup pause when sendmail is started,
that means sendmail is getting stuck before it forks off and becomes a
daemon.  There can't be all *that* much that it does before this
point, but I don't know off hand.

Sorry there's more questions than ideas, but maybe one of them will
lead to something useful.


lex