On Thu, 10 Jul 2003, Richard Ibbotson wrote:

> At 03.15 every morning my NetBSD 1.6 box produces a message at the same
> time as it connects itself to the net with ISDN.  It says .. "
> sendmail [15717]: gethostbyaddr(xIP. Address. of the. box .xx) failed:
> 1 "

At 3:15 a.m., that is probably the daily (and security) report being
emailed to root.

> Tried 'pkg_info sendmail' it says " can't find package 'sendmail'
> installed or in a file!"  Tried 'whereis sendmail' and it says ....
>  /usr/bin/sendmail.  Don't want sendmail.  Tried pkg_delete sendmail.
> Won't let me delete it.  Not quite sure what it do with this.

sendmail is part of the base (or default) NetBSD installation. NetBSD
includes a variety of essential software in the basic install (before any
packages are installed). NetBSD is a complete operating system.

(For your information, /usr/sbin/sendmail is really a mailwrapper that is
configured by default to use /usr/libexec/sendmail/sendmail.)

You can turn off the daily reports by commenting out the settings in
root's crontab. (You could use "crontab -e".) I'd advise against that
though.

But that won't really fix your problem, because cron and other utilities
may wish to send emails too.

A mailer is usually consider essential to a Unix system.

> Anyone suggest how to either stop this or deleter sendmail in the hope
> that it might stop my machine from connecting at 03.15.

Maybe edit your /etc/hosts file so that IP address is defined. And then
maybe it won't do that DNS lookup (over the internet). And, probably
(since it is the default), it will just email the daily reports locally
to same box.

   Jeremy C. Reed
   http://www.reedmedia.net/