Ok, a couple of newbie questions... MUST i use sendmail? and why on earth does it take 3-5 minutes to start at boot time? Its not really a problem, merely an annoyance. If I don't need it, how do I stop it from starting? thanks for any help! :)

Most likely sendmail is having difficulty resolving a name / IP for your current IP. Try addind a name and corresponding IP entry in your /etc/hosts file. That will probably speed up boot time considerably. Nobody is making you run any service. If you make the script /etc/init.d/sendmail not executable, sendmail won't start at boot time. Alternately you could remove the symbolic links from /etc/rc2.d/ or /etc/rc3.d that point to /etc/init.d/sendmail

Some things need an MTA however, such as cron. You don't need to use sendmail however. Debian ships with exim which is small and light, and good in 95% situations. Others like qmail or postfix. In this case, it does seem like sendmail has a problem with DNS or the network. It would be well worth trying to fix this! Do the log files give any message about why sendmail isn't starting?

hi all, why use such a long route just to disable sendmail from starting at boot-up? follow this step 1: at shell prompt type 'setup' step 2: a menu'l popup and select 'services configuration' step 3: a list of services you'll see. search for service 'sendmail' and unselect it by pressing space bar when pointer is above it. that's all folks! sHIVAPRASADp

heh...where would I find the log files? I did the setup thing, and turned sendmail off, so thats good, but I'd still like to know where the log files are...that'd be super helpful! :) Thanks, Helen

Most of your system log files are located in /var/log and for mail is maillog. cd /var/log In the future, for shortcut just type 'ntsysv' at the command line to see the services and enable or disable services. It only setup your current runlevel. If you want to set multiple-runlevels type "ntsysv --level 235" for services to start or stop in runlevel 2, 3 and 5.