[linux-help] Re: Very slow sendmail startup

[Jeff Vian <jvian10@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sun, 2005-05-15 at 20:39 -0500, Carl D Cravens wrote:
> On Sun, 15 May 2005, bbales wrote:
> 
> > I tried to make some sense out of the newaliases line, but it seems to be a
> > 732K C program (starts with "ELF").
> 
> newaliases should be a link to sendmail.  All it does is compile your 
> aliases file to the database format.  No reason to call that every time 
> you boot up if you make sure you rebuild the aliases database whenever 
> the aliases file (usually /etc/aliases) changes.
> 

Newaliases is set to run on startup JIC the user made changes and forgot
to run it manually.

If some of the aliases are internet mail addresses the delay here may
also be related to the DNS you note below.

> > Even six minutes for a laptop to boot up is too much.  Does anyone have 
> > any ideas?
> 
> Delays here could be caused by slow DNS lookups... I believe sendmail 
> defaults to looking at the IP address of the primary network interface, 
> then doing a reverse-DNS lookup to find all the domains that sendmail 
> might have to handle mail for.  It may do other DNS lookups at startup as 
> well.
> 

Is this machine a mail server for other domains?  If so, then make sure
it has an internet connection at boot time.  If not, then why should
sendmail be looking up DNS addresses to start?

On the same thought, does the /etc/hosts file contain the line
   127.0.0.1               localhost.localdomain localhost
If not then it should, as per the note above this line in the
default /etc/hosts file.
That line missing can cause many problems in network services.

> If there is some kind of delay in the DNS lookup, the timeouts in 
> sendmail are rather lengthy, with each retry getting longer and longer 
> before it gives up.  So make sure your DNS is working properly.
> 

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