I've implemented the suggestions made by Grant Parnell about changing my "/etc/hosts" file and now, although "dnsdomainname" still prints nothing, although it returns success, "hostname -f" now gives the machine name, rather than just "localhost", as the FQDN. Also, "sendmail -d" now gives a full printout of its various settings, rather than just hanging after printing a few lines of compilation details. Of relevance to my (hopefully former) problem is that it prints:
(short domain name $w = localhost) (canonical domain name $j = localhost.localdomain) (subdomain name $m = localdomain) (nodename $k = "machine-name") where "machine-name" is the actual name of my machine. I haven't actually rebooted the machine, but the fact that "sendmail" now seems to know what is where suggests that the two-minute plus lookup will go away. So many thanks. Cheers, Malcolm Johnston -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
