During periods of inactivity a log entry in ./messages is created every 20 minutes. It has the form:

Nov 13 20:07:23 mail -- MARK --
Nov 13 20:27:23 mail -- MARK --
Nov 13 20:47:23 mail -- MARK --

The ./messages log has the syslog setting of: *.info. The message is always generated at 7:23, 27:23, and 47:23 past the hour

Can anyone tell me what is causing this message and/or how to stop it.

Thanks
Gavin

The daemons have access to the syslog... its sendmail. Its just telling you that its working despite the fact that it isn't doing anything. Its a good way to track down what time a mysterious death of a daemon occured. You must be able to stop it somewhere in the sendmail.cf file... but that thing is written in a language that makes a perl/chechnyan/machine language combo dialect seem easy to tackle. I'm pretty sure it hits marks regardless of what else its doing every 20 minutes (maybe it follows with processing the mailq... hmmm) since the daemon started. If your box isn't a mail server, heck, just rpm -r sendmail the heck out of there. Its just another daemon hogging resources, well, okay not like apache hogging, but taking some up nonetheless.

Cheers,

Finegan