Sendmail takes ages to start at bootup
Simon Slater
pyevet at aapt.net.au
Fri Dec 21 08:57:51 UTC 2007
On Fri, 2007-12-21 at 01:25 +1030, Tim wrote:
> On Thu, 2007-12-20 at 23:06 +1100, Simon Slater wrote:
> > Soooo..., going back to kindergarten..., the names I put in /etc/hosts
> > were made up to describe the box on a purely internal network. Should
> > the names/aliases be something different? What would/would not
> > conflict with public FQDN?
> Given that intro, I can't resist some fun with domain names...
>
> If you have SMTP server running on a machine called bluecrayons (the
> machine's hostname), then that machine needs to be able to resolve
> addresses in a way that makes sense to itself at start up. It'll try to
> resolve the name as the server starts up. It needs to be able to
> resolve those addresses, to itself, at least.
>
> A sample hosts file entry:
> 192.168.0.1 bluecrayons.example.com bluecrayons mail smtp
>
> That's an IP address, a FQDN, and a list of three aliases that you might
> have used (the hostname, a bog standard "mail" hostname, and another
> common "smtp" hostname). The latter two aliase being things that some
> people pick out of habit, but there's nothing saying you must do so,
> though it does make simple sense to users to configure mail.example.com
> as their mailserver).
>
> Your mail server can start up disconnected from a network, and that's
> all it'll care about (its own addressing - that out of the interfaces
> it's using, the addresses resolve). It can start up connected to a
> network, and the same applies. Thus far, that's all for internal
> purposes.
>
> However, something from outside connecting to your mail server is going
> to expect a public name to match a public IP address. You could have
> the same hostname/domain names, and external DNS servers use the
> external IP address to the machine, and internal DNS servers giving a
> different IP address to other local machines.
>
> e.g. An outside DNS server might associate 208.77.188.166 with
> bluecrayons.example.com. Outside services would connect to you using
> that FQDN or IP, and since they both resolve against each other,
> externally, those outside services are happy about it.
>
> As for what won't conflict, don't make use of real domain names
> belonging to someone else, or make up ones that might be registered by
> someone at some time.
>
> An IP address is how you connect between A and B. A and B might have
> more than one address. Which one is used depends on the networking.
>
The lights have just come on, physically and metaphorically! A
thunderstorm has sat over the area for most of the day with power on and
off all day, so I left the mail til now. Ever read all you can lay your
hands on and still seemed in the dark? The light has turned on now.
I realise now what I have done and how to fix it. Too late to start
now. First thing tomorrow. Many thanks.
--
Regards
Simon
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