service SMTP unknown

I have a Solaris 9 server running sendmial 8.9. I recently began getting an error when sendmail starts and when it sends a message. The error is “makeconnection: service smtp unknown”. The messages are still delivered, but the error is annoying.It is logged as mail.error and I’d rather not disable mail.error completely. The sendmail service is defined in /etc/services (I even reconfigured the file). I even copied a new sendmail.cf from a similiarly configured machine that worked. I can’t seem to get rid of this error. Any ideas? Your help is appreciated.