Date: Mon, 31 Jan 2000 18:48:37 -0800 (PST) From: Doug Barton <Doug@gorean.org> To: Stephen <sdk@yuck.net> Cc: "James A. Mutter" <jmutter@ds.net>, freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Sendmail slow to answer Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0001311836420.1009-100000@dt051n0b.san.rr.com> In-Reply-To: <20000131161459.A543@visi.com>
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On Mon, 31 Jan 2000, Stephen wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 31, 2000 at 03:43:20PM -0500, James A. Mutter wrote:
> > > I've had a weird problem with sendmail ever since I upgraded my
> > > home server system from 2.2.8 to 3.x. I have a mailserver running on that
> > > machine for personal mail, and as the outgoing smtp server for my home
> > > network. Everything works as it should, except that connecting to the
> > > server is very slow. It does answer eventually, and once it answers it's
> > > snappy enough, but it's very slow (around 5 seconds) to answer.
> > >
> > > At first I thought that was related to not having updated my
> > > sendmail.cf, but I finally got around to doing that last night and it did
> > > not improve things. Any suggestions here would be welcome, OTHER than a
> > > suggestion to use a different mailer. I do have that on my list to try
> > > something else (probably postfix) soon, but it's not practical to change
> > > it right now.
> >
> > I'm not a Sendmail guru - but is identd running? I think that may be
> > the cause of your problem here.
Well, this is definitely some part of the problem. When I enable
ident in inetd.conf the delay is completely eliminated. This is true
whether or not I use the "real" identd server or the "always return
error" version. Rather than leave identd on, I solved this problem by
changing
#O Timeout.ident=30s to
O Timeout.ident=3s
in /etc/sendmail.cf. I can handle that much of a delay, but more seems
silly given the general uselessness of ident anyway (and please, no flame
wars on that topic, see archives for more details).
> I don't think identd normally needs to run, but the identd port 113 should
> be open on the server. If the server is silently dropping port 113
> packets, the remote host trying to pass mail will timeout before continuing
> with the smtp connection. My ISP idents me when forwarding mail, and I use
> a firewall to reset the port connection.
This was also a good thing to check, as I do pretty heavy ipfw
filtering, although I do allow 113 with the following rule:
781 allow tcp from any to any 113 in recv ep0 setup
where ep0 is my outside interface.
> Also make sure your dns is working properly.
Several people wrote in with this suggestion, and thanks to those
I didn't reply to already. DNS was the first thing I checked, but I
neglected to mention that. Nice to know that one has friends...
Thanks,
Doug
--
"Welcome to the desert of the real."
- Laurence Fishburne as Morpheus, "The Matrix"
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