when sendmail starts up it gets it's identity by probing the
interfaces and doing a reverse lookup.  Either put a fqdn in
/etc/hosts or, better, put the machines into DNS.

...

OSI - that's the protocol that will displace TCP/IP by 1993, right?
Developed in a clean room by people not hindered by actual real
world use or testing.  At least it gave us that pretty 7 layer stack.

Quoting Philip Christian (philipchristian2003@yahoo.co.uk):
> 
> I now have two portable NetBSD PCs in my lab (the spare bedroom).  The idea is that I can power them up, and then telnet, ftp from my laptop and compile some code, play with the OSI stack etc, then shut them down and put them back in the cupboard.  They seem to start up quite nicely without any keyboard mouse or monitor which is neat.
> 
> Anyway, when I boot them I get:
> 
> localhost sendmail [135]: My unqualified hostname (localhost) unknown; sleeping for retry
> 
> then
> 
> localhost sendmail [135]: Unable to qualify my own domain name (localhost) -- using shortname
> 
> this introduces an annoying delay
> 
> Questions:-
> 
> Do I really need sendmail? how did it get there? what starts it going? can I get rid of it?
> 
> If I can't then how do I get rid of the delay while it "sleeps for a retry"?
> 
> I am guessing that it is something to do with the the hosts file which at the moment just has localhost 127.0.0.1 or whatever it is.  The machines also have a line in etc/ifconfig.ep0 which gives them a 10.0.1.x address and an OSI address, maybe it is something to do with that..
> 
> Thanks, Philip
> 
> 
> 
> 
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