Hi all,
I did a quick search and didn't see anything like this mentioned yet.
I noticed the other day that when my machine booted, sendmail and
sm-client took a very long time (about 3 minutes) to start. Tests
with a booted system show that it is not just happening on boot. They
just take that long to start. I've done some investigation and found
that sendmail is hanging with the command:
/usr/bin/newaliases
and then again at:
initlog -q -c '/usr/sbin/sendmail -bd -q1h'
I'm actually not sure where this second command comes from, as I don't
see it explicitly in /etc/init.d/sendmail. sm-client seems to hang at
a similar initlog command. I'm running /etc/init.d/sendmail with
#!/bin/bash -x to see these commands.
The newaliases program itself takes about 1 minute to run. Running
strace seems to reveal why; it hangs at the noted position in the
strace:
....selection from strace....
rt_sigaction(SIGPIPE, {0x2a96542cd0, [], 0x4000000}, {SIG_IGN}, 8) = 0
socket(PF_FILE, SOCK_DGRAM, 0) = 3
fcntl(3, F_SETFD, FD_CLOEXEC) = 0
connect(3, {sa_family=AF_FILE, path="/dev/log"}, 16) = 0
sendto(3, "<18>Feb 1 21:52:25 sendmail[656"..., 101, 0, NULL, 0) = 101
rt_sigaction(SIGPIPE, {SIG_IGN}, NULL, 8) = 0
rt_sigprocmask(SIG_BLOCK, [ALRM], [], 8) = 0
rt_sigaction(SIGALRM, {0x552ab38360, [], SA_RESTART|0x4000000},
{SIG_DFL}, 8) = 0
alarm(60) = 0
rt_sigprocmask(SIG_UNBLOCK, [ALRM], [ALRM], 8) = 0
rt_sigprocmask(SIG_UNBLOCK, [ALRM], [], 8) = 0
# the program hangs right after printing "pause(" below
pause() = ? ERESTARTNOHAND (To be restarted)
--- SIGALRM (Alarm clock) @ 0 (0) ---
alarm(0) = 0
alarm(0) = 0
rt_sigreturn(0) = -1 EINTR (Interrupted system call)
stat("/etc/mail/service.switch", 0x7fbfffb2f0) = -1 ENOENT (No such
file or directory)
....end from strace....
I can post the entire strace somewhere if it might be relevant.
It sets an alarm for 60 seconds, which must eventually time out.
Anyone know what is going on here?
$ rpm -qa sendmail
sendmail-8.13.1-2.x86_64
I haven't changed any configuration files, exept for a recent alais to
send root's mail to me. The problems happened prior to that change
though. I don't know when this started, but I think it must be a
recent development. sendmail isn't mentioned in /var/log/yum.log, so
maybe from a kernel upgrade? I can try an older kernel and see if
that speeds things up if that might be relevant. I'm currently
running kernel 2.6.10-1.741_FC3 x86_64. Any ideas? Has anyone else
seen this?
Jonathan
