Lan Barnes wrote: > On Sun, August 19, 2007 12:19 pm, James G. Sack (jim) wrote: >> Gregory K. Ruiz-Ade wrote: >>> On Aug 19, 2007, at 8:53 AM, Lan Barnes wrote: >>> >>>> OK, I replaced sendmail w/ postfix because sendmail was taking minutes >>>> to >>>> load on boot. But now when I restart postfix it takes just as long, >>>> indicating that the fault is in some basic configuration, like maybe >>>> the >>>> dreaded reverse lookup DNS issue (I'm just waving my hands here -- I >>>> have >>>> no idea what I just said). >>> Well, make sure that myhostname and mydomainname are set to what you >>> want them to be (instead of relying upon postfix to figure it out, which >>> can be problematic on a mobile system that might not always have an IP >>> address. >> Confirming (my recollection) that MTAs spend a lot of time looking for a >> fully qualified name upon startup. In old days, sendmail would hang for >> 5 minutes (or more?). >> >> The FQ part is perhaps surprising. Be sure you _have_ a fullname. Try >> hostname >> hostname -s >> hostname -f >> >> Perhaps GKRA can correct me but I seem to remember that a domain name >> without a suffix also causes a problem. >> >> Note that the domain doesn't need to be public or real -- it just has to >> be syntactically correct. I use sack-net.pvt. So I get >> hostname -f >> jgs.sack-net.pvt >> >>> Also, RH-based systems tend to put the hostname in /etc/hosts as an >>> alias for localhost. If it's not there you might want to try putting it >>> there. >>> >>> Also, check your syslog, and see if anything is being reported there >>> during postfix startup. >>> >>> If you stop postfix once your system is running, and start it manually, >>> do you get the same delay? >> Regards, >> ..jim >> >> > > Gus has implied that I don't need it at all. Is this true?
Not sure. I'd like to hear opinions from mail-gurus -- especialy those who use laptops a lot. And from those latter, what special considerations might there be regarding offline work habits. I'd like to hear general recommendations for users behind NAT who use their ISP's (or some other external provider's) mail services. I assume this represents a relatively huge fraction of users. Then, there might be a need for a breakdown into users who don't do anything fancy (Aunt Tilly users), and users who like to get into trouble [uno hoo] by running _interesting_ programs -- in particular, things that send mail (eg /bin/mail, even). >From time to time I tried not running an MTA on the basis of minimizing services, but I always ran into difficulties when doing command line stuff with /bin/mail -- so I fell back into running the service. Regards, ..jim (needs de-confusing as much as LB, maybe more) -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
