I recently installed RH 7.3 on a Compaq Presario with Intel's built-in NIC without any network. The boot process was quick.

Recently, I installed a LAN between the Compaq and one Windows XP machine, configured the eth0 interface, enabled Telnet and WU-FTP. Every think seems to work fine. I can ping localhost and windows machine from compaq and I can ping, telnet, and ftp to compaq from windows machine.

The problem is that when I rebooted the Linux machine, it waited 3 minues on "starting sendmail: " message and then booted fine.

I did set up the host IP addresses in "hosts" file. My hosts file looks like:

127.0.0.1 localhost.localdomain localhost
192.168.100.1 compaq
192.168.100.2 windows

I am not using DHCP or DNS. Ouput of "hostname" is "compaq". Output of "hostid" is "a8c00164".

I would like to make the boot faster and would greatly appreciate any help. BTW, I do not need sendmail. I could disable it if that is the only way to hasten the boot -- would like to know how to do that, too. Thanks a million in advance.

Yes, DNS (or lack of it) is delaying the sendmail startup. It's probably trying to perform the forward and reverse resolutions on itself and is timing out from no response.

Check your network settings ... strange default route? Check /var/log/ for something suspicious that's causing the problem

Thanks Markus, for: "Check /var/log/ for something suspicious that's causing the problem". The file maillog has the following messages:

"My unqualified name (compaq) unknown; sleeping for retry."
"Unable to qualify my own domain name (compaq) -- using short name."

What is an unqualified domain name, and how I can modify my hosts entry to fix the problem? Sorry for the ignorance; I am new to this stuff. Thanks.

Thanks guys. I found the problem. I changed the line n /etc/hosts to:

192.168.100.1 compaq.localdomain compaq

This line mirrors the first line

127.0.0.1 localhost.localdomain localhost

Now sendmail is able to start quickly and the var/log/sendmail does not have the messages I wrote in my earlier posting.

Thanks much for the help.