After a wait of about 5 min, the boot moved on to hang on sm-client. When that finally timed out, I was able to log in.

The problem was indirectly DNS.

When I had configured the 2nd interface (which I added in the last reboot), I included a gateway address. Then when I booted, there were two interfaces each with their gateway address. Well the second (non-existant) one was used, so no access to the DNS server.

It is those beartraps you know about that get you every time.

replies-lists-a1z2-centos@listmail.innovate.net wrote:

the sendmail hang is generally a dns issue -- sendmail is trying to resolve the hostname. it will timeout past this after a bit. having the appropriate entries in /etc/hosts should resolve this.

• Rick

------------ Original Message ------------

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Date: Thursday, December 27, 2007 10:03:52 AM -0500 From: Robert Moskowitz rgm@htt-consult.com To: CentOS mailing list centos@centos.org Subject: [CentOS] boot hangs on trying to start sendmail

I am building a new server. It will be a temporary firewall of sorts.

I am well into the config, made a lot of changes; almost ready to set it up in the target networks, but now....

The system hangs trying to start sendmail. I was thinking hard about disabling sendmail, but thought I needed it for internal functions, so did not. yet.

So is there someway to get the system working so I can change something like disable sendmail?

The system has no cdrom, diskette, etc. In fact the kybd/monitor require a special temp setup. Perhaps I can edit the kernel line in grub to disable something?

If necessary, I can pull the drive and put it in a system that does support cdrom. That is the way I did the initial harddrive install.

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