sendmail freezes Mandrake boot

dreakon · 12-03-2004, 08:56 AM

Im having issue in booting my Mandrake 10.0 system, it seems to freeze up. When I checked it out in verbose mode it seems to freeze on an item called "sendmail". Now when I choose interactive mode and tell it to not start sendmail and continue with the boot it works just fine. is there any way to just disable sendmail period, it really serves no useful purpose in my case.

Thanks in advance.

sigsegv · 12-03-2004, 10:11 AM

Not sure how to disable it on a drake system, but it's stalling trying to do a DNS lookup ... probably on itself.

dreakon · 12-03-2004, 03:34 PM

Thanks, I'll check in to that.

paul.nel · 01-28-2005, 01:03 PM

This is a fairly late reply to this post, but maybe it is useful. I have been having the same problem myself and even when I restart sendmail after boot up using /etc/init.d/sendmail start. Idid hang, but it took about 5 min to startup.

I have recieved sigsegv's advice previously when I posted the same problem much earlier and I think it worked if I remember correctly. However, at some stage I started haveing the same problem and when I checked my /etc/hosts file, my localhost was indeed correctly referenced with an entry of :

Code:

127.0.0.1  localhost.localdomain hostname

at the end of the file after all the other hosts on my network.

However! When I moved the line:

Code:

127.0.0.1  localhost.localdomain hostname

to the beginning of the /etc/hosts file, sendmail restarted without a problem. So maybe you can just check this out and see if it sorts your problem out if you are still experiencing it.

Regards
p.n

dreakon · 01-31-2005, 03:42 PM

Thanks but I gave up on Mandrake a while ago, too many problems, I've been using SuSE for a while with no real issues yet

RoofRabbit · 02-01-2005, 11:49 PM

The sendmail hangup usually occurs when the hostname has not been set.

sigsegv · 02-02-2005, 05:35 PM

In the interest of accuracy in speaking -- If the hostname was not set at install time it will be set to localhost, which will always resolve via /etc/hosts (assuming the file hasn't been deleted). What normally causes it is that the hostname is set but it's not mapped via hosts/DNS and so the server has to timeout (or be interrupted) on the lookup to continue.

As for the suggestion by paul.nel -- There's no arguing with results, but no, the order of the entries in the host file should have zero bearing on this (unless you have multiple names mapped to a single IP or vice versa, which seems unlikely with localhost/loopback).