when i am connected to the network at work with my laptop Redhat 9 loads quick and fine, but when it is not connected to the network it takes ages (like 10 minutes!!!!) and hangs inparticular on 'sendmail' for ages, how can i stop this happening so that it always loads normally.

please be explicit i am a newbie

thanks

andy

I've had the same prob.What i did was uninstall the sendmail server package and it stoped the hang. I'm not sure if that is required for using a general e-mail.

how do you do that?

I have experinced that before.

No need to unistall it

Just boot the system to runlevel 1
or another runlevel where
sendmail will not start

and set sendmail not to start in that runlevel (where it hanged )

use chkconfig --level <runvelel> sendmail off

chkconfig sendmail off
-Default runlevels will be applied here

thanks,

but what is a run level?

for uninstalling packages you go to what would be the start button if you were running windows, system settings, then packages. This is how you get to it in KDE Red Hat 8.0.

as far as run levels i'll try to tell you the little bit i know about it. You can sort of compare it to safe mode in windows if you are fimilar with that. Run levles depending on what you pick has certain pieces of programming that won't run. I think it is run level 1 that doesn't allow network connetions. there should be some good info on run levels if you do a search on google or maybe one of the more experienced posters can give a more in depth explanation.

i'm a newbie myself, so i'm not 100% sure of the following;
1. in general you don't need sendmail, unless ur running an email server!!
2. after booting, as root run 'ntsysv' choose not to run sendmail
3. u can also run 'service sendmail stop' to stop it immediately without rebooting, should be done as root also

If you do not have sendmail or another mail transport agent your system won't be able to send/receive e-mail (incl. local email).

I had the same problem and it was because I went and tried to change the HOSTNAME without adding it to /etc/hosts. It just sat there *forever*. I just gave up and went back to localhost.localdomain.

hi there markus1982!
well i didn't know that u actually need sendmail!
i was just wondering, do u need it even if u use mozilla's mail client??? i mean if u have a pop3 account?

Very few apps these days require sendmail to, uh, send mail. Most are able to use remote SMTP.

More 99.9% of the things you want to do with Linux, you will not need sendmail and most likely shouldn't have it running.

Stopping sendmail may be the quickest way. But this URL will help even more...

http://rhlufaq.synfin.net/DOCS/sendmlboot.html

--ken