On 24/06/07, Malcolm Johnston <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Hi Amos, Thanks for your comments. Do you have the problem with the slow startup as well?
No. I don't run sendmail on my home machine. I don't have an SMTP server on my machine since it doesn't expect any incoming mail, all outgoing mail is relayed through GMail's SMTP servers. By the way, I don't have an "/etc/hostname" file, but there is
an "/etc/hosts.equiv" file, which is for "rsh" permission, and which just has
"hostname" is a command which usually gets executed during startup to SET the hostname which is then returned by subsequent calls to "hostname" without a parameter. On Debian this happens in /etc/init.d/hostname.sh and it gets the name of the host to set from /etc/hostname if it contains anything, defaulting to "localhost" if nothing is available, but it could very well be somewhere else on slackware. As for having rsh daemon installed on your system - I wasn't aware that any system comes with this as a standard any more but if that's the situation with slackware then I'd recommend to: 1. uninstall it immidietly, or at least disable it. 2. consider moving to another distro if that's the level of security standards on slackware (guess which one I'd recommend :). the bare entry "localhost" in it: it came with the installation and is It means that rsh will trust any user from localhost connecting through rsh, since rsh is totally insecure (e.g. it's unencrypted therefore it's easier to inject packets from another host pretending to come from the permitted host) it's a pretty large hole in your system's security.
untouched. Having thought a bit more about the hostname issue, it occurs to me that when the primary machine's IP (it's not public and is just for the LAN) was aliased to "eth0:1" to get the LAN up and running, this effectively sequestered it to the LAN, leaving "localhost" to become the default. However, this is no more than a conjecture. The init file "rc.inet1.conf" only has `DHCP_HOSTNAME[#]=""' entries in it, and the other files in "/etc/rc.d" have no explicit references to any hostname. Basically, the only file with such entries is "/etc/hosts".
/etc/rc.d usually contains just scripts which read system-specific data from other files under /etc. Try something else - shutdown sendmail then run with "strace -t -ooutputfile -f /etc/rc.d/whatever-is-the-sendmail-start-script-on-slackware" (where "outputfile" is the name of a file to dump strace's output to). Then see what does sendmail gets stuck on (probably a system call which takes more than a couple of seconds, probalby two minutes). I wouldn't be bothered were it not for the slow sendmail startup and the
info I got from Internode that this can be related to not having a fully qualified hostname with a DNS domain name. If the machine spends a good two minutes
Do you need an SMTP server on your machine at all? launching the sendmail daemon and queue runner, it must be looking around
pretty hard for something. I might try hardwiring the Internode mail IP in as a second nameserver, but again this is a longshot. Fortunately, I do very
I wouldn't bet on a DNS time out, DNS queries are usually much faster while TCP connection attempts by default take 2 minutes to time out. little rebooting. The solution is probably quite straightforward, but not
to me at the moment. We'll see.
For a start - try finding out how to tell Slackware the name of the host (some arbitrary name you like, doesn't have to be anything with your FQDN, I named mine after some town in New Zealand). Cheers,
Malcolm Johnston
Cheers, --Amos -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
