Hello,

I am having troubles with sendmail which was working fine till my last reboot.

I am working on Red Hat Linux 8.0 3.2-7 with sendmail-8.12.5-7 rpm.

According the boot.log, sendmail is not starting :
Jan 5 17:10:10 localhost xinetd: xinetd startup succeeded
Jan 5 17:10:13 localhost sendmail:
Jan 5 17:10:13 localhost sendmail:
Jan 5 17:10:13 localhost sendmail: sendmail startup failed
Jan 5 17:10:13 localhost sendmail: sm-client startup succeeded

And in the processes list, I have the following line :

smmsp 664 1 0 17:10 ? 00:00:00 sendmail: Queue runner@01:00:00 for /var/spool/clientmqueue

In /var/spool/clientmqueue remains about 20 messages waiting to be sent.


When I try the below command, I get as follows :

[root@localhost /]# /usr/sbin/sendmail -bd -os
554 5.0.0 No local mailer defined
554 5.0.0 QueueDirectory (Q) option must be set
[root@localhost /]#


I do have a fair understanding about SMTP but I am new with sendmail.
And I am not sure about what is ok or not in the config files.
For instance my /etc/mail/sendmail.cf is empty. Is that normal ?
And my /etc/sysconfig/sendmail has only two lines :

DAEMON=yes
QUEUE=1h

I tried to asl about sendmail status as follows :
[root@localhost /]# /etc/rc.d/init.d/sendmail status
sendmail (pid 664) is running...
[root@localhost /]# /etc/rc.d/init.d/sendmail stop
Shutting down sendmail: [ OK ]
Shutting down sm-client: [FAILED]
[root@localhost /]# /etc/rc.d/init.d/sendmail start
Starting sendmail: 554 5.0.0 No local mailer defined
554 5.0.0 QueueDirectory (Q) option must be set
[FAILED]
Starting sm-client: [ OK ]

Any idea/teaching are welcome while I am checking the spartan sendmail.org's FAQ.

(and I can not use postfix or others...)

Thank you for the help.

edit the "/etc/sysconfig/network" file and enter you hostname. then edit the "/etc/hosts" file to resolve that hostname to IP address. I am a qmail administrator but have some sendmail servers (inherited) on my clients sites, this is a problem with newly installed system that aren't in dns. With regard to teaching sendmail, this subject is way beyond the scope of this forum. Red Hat have some excellent documentation on their site on networking services configuration. Here is documentation from sendmail.org.
http://www.sendmail.org/m4/readme.html

An empty CF file is not normal. What config changes were made before your last reboot that might impact the sendmail configuration?

Thank you for both answers I received. Indeed, the sendmail.cf was not good (why? I don't know). However, we restored a previous version and it worked nice and smooth right after the new change.

Thank you again for the help.