My machine is on a private LAN connected to a router (with DHCP enabled) and Fedora Core 4 assigned it the uninformative default name locaIhost.localdomain. I wanted to change the default name of my machine to something more informative.

First I tried using the command hostname. The command executed successfully but when I did "hostname -f" I got the error "hostname: unknown host"

So I edited /etc/hosts which now contains a single line "127.0.0.1 newhostname newhostname". I rebooted, but the machine name did not change, as evidenced by the login screen, the output of the command "hostname", and the prompt.

Then I edited /etc/sysconfig/network to set "NETWORK=newhostname". During reboot, "Starting sendmail" took an unreasonable long time (which was never this long before) such that I thought the machine has hang. After I finally logged in, I saw that the machine name has changed, as evidenced by the login screen, the output of the command "hostname", and the prompt. I was able to ping my machine's IP address, 127.0.0.1, newhostname, and localhost.

Does anyone know how to fix the problem of sendmail taking a freakishly long time to start? Thanks for any help.

thanhvn

This is totally from memory because I'm currently in Gentoo which uses a different format

/etc/hosts

127.0.0.1 hostname.domainname hostname localhost.localdomain

As an example

127.0.0.1 server.linuxquestions.org server localhost.localdomain

/etc/sysconfig/network

NETWORKING=yes
HOSTNAME=server

Obviously "server" comes from the example above

Pete

Pete, I don't have a problem changing the hostname (read my post carefully). The problem I have is that after successfully changing the hostname, the sendmail service takes an unreasonably long time to start. What I want to know is how to fix that.

This startup delay is most likey caused by sendmail not being able to resolve the host name, the host name is usually defined in the file /etc/mail/local-host-names . Change the entry in that file to match your new host name and the delays should be gone.

HTH

Mad.

thanhvn

Sorry I did'nt understand your exact problem but as madluther stated if sendmail can't determine it's host name then this will cause a delay

As it checks /etc/hosts for this the format of the file must be correct

Pete

After several trials and errors, I finally figured out the solution to the problem. The value of the parameter inet_interfaces in /etc/postfix/main.cf must match one of the values in /etc/hosts. By default inet_interfaces is set to localhost. And since I've changed /etc/hosts to no longer contain localhost, this caused the problem. So I changed /etc/hosts to "127.0.0.1 localhost.localdomain localhost newhostname" and the problem is solved (and my machine name is still changed to newhostname as I originally set out to do). Thanks for all the help.

thanhvn

Glad you got the problem fixed, but the correct information in the first place may have speeded up the process

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Sendmail or Postfix ?

Have fun

Pete