Sendmail startup problems in HP-UX 11i

[Jouni Kela]

Hi all,

I'm using B-serial work station with HP-UX 11i. The work station gets it's ip-address from dhcp-server. When I startup my station so starting of the sendmail daemon takes about 10 minutes.
How I should change the configuration of sendmail.cf file?

- Jouni

[U.SivaKumar_2]

Hi,

Edit /etc/mail/sendmail.cf file and add this line.

O DaemonPortOptions=Port=smtp,Addr=0.0.0.0, Name=MTA

And restart the sendmail

regards,
U.SivaKumar

[Jouni Kela]

Thanks U.SivaKumar for helping me but it didn't solve the problem. I made those changes and now sendmail daemon don't startup at all- it fails.

I'm using ADSL (asymmetric digital subscriper lines) connection. I think that sendmail configuration should be different when I use ADSL connection? What do you think about it?

- Jouni

[U.SivaKumar_2]

Hi,

The main problem here is the DHCP . since DHCP allots random addresses everytime to clients in normal setup. you cannot configure sendmail to listen in a fixed IP address and sendmail cannot resolve the hostname and IP address. Therefore SMTP connections will not come to your server.

Why are you using DHCP for servers ?. Better use Fixed IP addresses.

In the case , you strictly want to use DHCP , then you have configure Dynamic DNS client in the Linux server which would update it's DHCP ip address to a DNS server against a fixed hostname. The fixed hostname can be then used in sendmail.cf Port option

O DaemonPortOptions=Port=smtp,Addr=linux.mydomain.com, Name=MTA

regards,
U.SivaKumar

[U.SivaKumar_2]

Hi,

The main problem here is the DHCP . since DHCP allots random addresses everytime to clients in normal setup. you cannot configure sendmail to listen in a fixed IP address and sendmail cannot resolve the hostname and IP address. Therefore SMTP connections will not come to your server.

Why are you using DHCP for servers ?. Better use Fixed IP addresses for Servers

In the case , you strictly want to use DHCP , then you have configure Dynamic DNS client in the Linux server which would update it's DHCP ip address to a DNS server against a fixed hostname. The fixed hostname can be then used in sendmail.cf Port option

O DaemonPortOptions=Port=smtp,Addr=linux.mydomain.com, Name=MTA

regards,
U.SivaKumar

[W.C. Epperson]

DaemonPortOptions should not have any bearing on this. The default is to listen on "all" IP interfaces.

Since the DHCP lease is acquired by /sbin/rc _before_ any of the runlevel directories/scripts, it should not be a factor in bringing up sendmail unless there is a delay in being able to use the address after acquiring it.

I'd look very closely at what's going on in the 10 minutes that it appears to take to start sendmail. Is sendmail really where the delay occurs?