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 at 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 ------------ > >> Date: Thursday, December 27, 2007 10:03:52 AM -0500 >> From: Robert Moskowitz <rgm at htt-consult.com> >> To: CentOS mailing list <centos at 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. >> >> > > > ---------- End Original Message ---------- > > >