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RH 7.3 DNS/sendmail slowness?

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by techstop

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Stupid me, I left my guard down by accident, because I was having trouble with an ipchain rule. During that time, I fired up wu-ftpd, which I normally don't do. Sure 'nuff, someone (almost) got me. I stopped him, because I happened to be on when it happened. But it did some damage (in particular, I couldn't delete cpio and tar, which he apparently modified). So I reinstalled, and put in RH 7.3 Since then, even though I moved from a Pentium II 233 to a PIII 866 or something like that, it'sseems slower. I'm at runlevel 3, so it's not an X server slowing me down. I notice it most when trying to resolve names, and with sendmail---slow to restart, and pine seems to take awhile before the message is sent.

Idears?

4 replies

by techstop

BTW, I mean that *sendmail* is slow to restart, not the machine. The machine boots up fast enough---although it hangs a little when it hits sendmail when starting up the services. And telnetting to the machine is slower now, too. I think all these might be named-related issues.

Sendmail 8.12.3
BIND 9.2.0

by bg4

I had a similiar problem and it was because of DNS. Make sure your DNS is correctly setup for your system. Some tests you could do are:
1. Stop named from running and just use the "hosts" file (making sure the order in host.conf is correct).
2. In the sendmail.cf file, set the option "DeliveryMode=deferred" which should stop the DNS lookups from happening. Sendmail should now run faster and accept mail for delivery but not actually deliver it. To deliver it run "sendmail -q". This will confirm if the problem is a DNS problem or not.

Hope this helps..

by techstop

The problem turns out to be somehow related to the firewall itself. If I disable the firewall, everything is fine. I've gone through the rules, and can't find a reason for this. I'm going to have to find some more information on configuring firewalls to see what I'm doing wrong. I had thoroughly checked the DNS config, and verified things were okay with "dig". Therefore, this answer was not the solution. I do thank you (much) for trying.

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