sendmail waiting at boot time

[Cameron Simpson]

On 22:14 01 Jul 2004, Shiraz Baig <shiraz_baig at yahoo.com> wrote:
| When my Redhat 9.0 boots, it stops at "Starting
| Sendmail" and then keeps waiting for a very long time.
| Then again it stops at "smb-client" and waits there
| endlessly. I want to get rid of this waiting. A few
| weeks back someone had suggested a solution. But I
| can't located it. First of all someone should tell me,
| how can we locate such issues from archives?
| 
| Secondly, I would request a solution for the above
| problem. I tried one solution, it did not work. I went
| to /etc/rc.d/rc3.d and deleted "S80sendmail". I knew
| it was just a link, and I shall be able to create it
| again when I need it. But this did not solve the
| problem. Then I also deleted it from rc2.d. But to no
| avail.
| 
| So, now I am looking for a solution, and also where
| from is it coming, when I have deleted it in rc3.d

If you're running in GUI mode you're using run level 5, not 3.
So check out rc5.d as well.

After that, edit /etc/init.d/sendmail and go down the bottom and change
this:

    case "$1" in
      start)
	    start
	    ;;

into this:

    case "$1" in
      start)
	    start &
	    ;;

That is just a simple hack to background the startup so that your boot
process doesn't wait for it. It won't solve the underlying problem that
is causing sendmail to hang on startup.

My first suspect with things like this is usually DNS. Is your network up and
DNS working when sendmail starts?

Cheers,
--
Cameron Simpson <cs at zip.com.au> DoD#743
http://www.cskk.ezoshosting.com/cs/

Death before dishonor / Drugs before lunch      - Aspen Gun and Drug Club