Sendmail takes a long time to start

Posted: 2012-07-26 13:39:39 by Alasdair Keyes

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I had someone come to me today with a CentOS 5.x machine that was taking upwards of 10 minutes to get to the login prompt.

When I rebooted the box, It hung for a long time on Sendmail and the Sendmail sm-client services

Starting Sendmail:

Between the two of them they took over 8 minutes to start. Helpfully /var/log/messages and /var/log/maillog didn't have any entries about why it took so long. After a bit of poking it turns out that he had changed the hostname from kvmhost01.local to kvmhost01.testlocal but hadn't updated /etc/hosts so sendmail couldn't find the IP associated with the hostname.

# Do not remove the following line, or various programs
# that require network functionality will fail.
127.0.0.1       kvmhost01.testlocal localhost.localdomain localhost
::1             localhost6.localdomain6 localhost6

It's only a small thing but obviously makes a big difference to Sendmail.

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