sendmail

[Master of Reality]

sendmail wont start. Thats it. It says 'starting sendmail:' but just sits there like that and never gives and error or aborts. It used to work, i dont believe i changed anything involved with sendmail except maybe if it is trying to go out to the web... My firewalll might be stopping it, could that be the problem?

[voidmain]

I suppose if you are trying to start Sendmail on the same box you have ipchains/iptables configured to block port 25 (even for localhost traffic) and depending on the ipchains/iptables options it could be causing Senmail to try infinitely to bind to port 25 but I haven't tested to see if that could really happen. I would think it should at least time out of give you an error about not being able to bind to port 25.  I suspect there are other issues though.  Are you sure there are no other sendmail processes running (ps auxwww | grep mail)?  Of course that should not also not cause a hang.

Open a second shell window and type "tail -f /var/log/messages" then in the first shell try and start Sendmail (/etc/rc.d/init.d/sendmail start).  See if any messages are being sent to the messages file.  You also might want to watch the "/var/log/maillog" file for any messages there. You can also try starting sendmail directly with debugging parameters.

[beltorak0]

i have problems with my sendmail also;

just a short while ago, cox (cable modem provider) must have switched it's dhcpc server release info, because it no longer returns my psuedo fqdn when i announce that my host is "dAn" (it used to spit back "dAn.hr.cox.net").... sendmail tries for a minute and a half (sometimes longer) to resolve my hostname "dAn" but to no avail.... let it run and check your logs.

I have since stopped the sendmail daemons from executing at startup because I am too lazy to use my ip as my hostname or register a valid one.... or figure out how to get sendmail to stop checking this.... anyway.

if this helps you, let me know.

-t.

[Master of Reality]

/var/log/maillog:

Code: [Select]

how do i set a fully qualified hostname?
[ September 06, 2002: Message edited by: Master of Reality / Bob ]

[ September 06, 2002: Message edited by: Master of Reality / Bob ]

[voidmain]

What's your /etc/hosts look like?  Did you change it? And what is your local host name set to (output from "hostname" command)?

[ September 06, 2002: Message edited by: void main ]

[Master of Reality]

its set to xen
it is properly configured in hosts (i am almost positive (not in Linux right now, but i checked it  couple seconds ago))

[voidmain]

What's your /etc/mail/sendmail.mc look like? Actually I would suggest going through this document:

http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/linux/RHL-7.3-Manual/ref-guide/s1-email-sendmail.html

and you should be going in no time.  But I know it is related to how you have your hostname/domain set up, and your /etc/hosts. But if you follow the above document you should be able to get it going on your own. The reason it takes so long for it to start is it can not resolve the hostname/domain you have it configured for.  There are some simple changes to sendmail.mc that should be able to override your local configuration. The sendmail.mc is a macro file used to generate (using the "m4" command) the /etc/sendmail.cf file (main sendmail configuration file).

One last thing. The homename in your /etc/sysconfig/network file should also match your /etc/hosts.

[ September 07, 2002: Message edited by: void main ]