From owner-freebsd-questions Mon Jan 31 22:53:59 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from dt051n0b.san.rr.com (dt051n0b.san.rr.com [204.210.32.11]) by builder.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id EB30B3D11 for ; Mon, 31 Jan 2000 22:53:54 -0800 (PST) Received: from slave (slave [10.0.0.1]) by dt051n0b.san.rr.com (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id SAA01113; Mon, 31 Jan 2000 18:48:41 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from Doug@gorean.org) Date: Mon, 31 Jan 2000 18:48:37 -0800 (PST) From: Doug Barton X-Sender: doug@dt051n0b.san.rr.com To: Stephen Cc: "James A. Mutter" , freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Sendmail slow to answer In-Reply-To: <20000131161459.A543@visi.com> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG 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" To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message