sendmail service question

deWin · 12-24-2004, 03:59 AM

All of a sudden my RH 9 installation is pausing at "Starting sendmail" for a long time and then at "Starting sm-client", boots up fine though but the wait is almost close to 3 minutes.

My question is, why would it want to wait so much and then have to ok it. Also, is this service absolutely required or can I just disable it?

Thanks for any assistance, as always you guys are real help.

twantrd · 12-24-2004, 04:53 AM

You can disable this if you want. You would need sendmail running (or some other mail service) if you intend to receive and/or send mails. To disable sendmail on redhat do:

1. chkconfig sendmail off (this will not make sendmail run on startup)
2. service sendmail stop (to stop sendmail if it is running)

-twantrd

amfoster · 12-24-2004, 06:11 AM

Sendmail will usually hang if there is a problem with dns and reverse zones. Are you set up with a dns server running?

Usually, you can fix it with entries in the /etc/hosts file, but the problem does relate to DNS

deWin · 12-24-2004, 09:39 AM

Very possible, I did change the "127.0.0.1 localhost" entry to "192.168.10.3 optiplex" to make it run on my network, I did then put in the 127 entry below the 192...

Update: Fixed, simply removed the 192 entry and it works like a charm. Thanks once again guys.

deWin · 12-24-2004, 07:10 PM

Update to the issue at hand, I fixed it by removing the 192.168.10.3 entry from hosts file, sendmail resolves and starts up fine but my httpd service is failing on boot up. It says
"httpd: Could not determine server's fully qualified domain name, using 127.0.0.1 for ServerName" [FAILED]

and of course I can't pull pages from the machine.

What am I missing now?

amfoster · 12-24-2004, 08:46 PM

Well, you can do one of two things. First try a host entry such as

127.0.0.1 localhost.localdomain localhost 192.168.10.3 optiplex.whatever.net optiplex

That is all one line. It word wrapped on here.

That should work. If not, the issue is reverse zones. That will involve setting up dns, but I am pretty sure the resolution for optiplex to 127.0.0.1 will work out.

-tony

deWin · 12-24-2004, 09:02 PM

It seems like it worked when I did a service restart, I'm now rebooting.... I'm sure it'll work.

Man, it was that simple? It worked like a charm. I don't know why I have to learn something new everytime I do the same thing... oh well, something new learnt and gone into my log document.

Thanks a lot guys.

ajm8372 · 12-29-2004, 09:18 AM

OK I am having a similar problem. I am running Mandrake 10 trying to start up the httpd service. I get the error message

Code:

Starting httpd2: httpd2: Could not determine the server's fully qualified domain name, using 127.0.0.1 for ServerName [FAILED]

my etc/hosts file contains
192.168.1.102 webserver.mydomain.com webserver

deWin · 12-29-2004, 10:29 AM

Try changing that line to;

127.0.0.1 localhost.localdomain localhost 192.168.1.102 webserver.mydomain.com webserver

All in one line. That did the trick for me.

ajm8372 · 12-29-2004, 07:07 PM

Ok, turns out the problem had nothing to do with the ServerName. Should have checked the apache error log sooner.

amfoster · 12-29-2004, 07:19 PM

Enlighten us. What was the problem? Your error message said
"Starting httpd2: httpd2: Could not determine the server's fully qualified domain name, using 127.0.0.1 for ServerName [FAILED]"

deWin · 12-29-2004, 07:53 PM

Yeah I'd like to know that as well.

ajm8372 · 12-31-2004, 04:12 PM

Well I figured out through my error log that for one of the Virtual Hosts I set up, that the error log file I had specified didn't exist yet. I created the file with appropriate privileges and apache was able to restart. A pretty simple problem to fix, but definitely didn't have anything to do with the FQDN message I was getting when trying to start apache.