[CentOS] Cannot boot; stops at Sendmail

Will McDonald
Wed, 28 Feb 2007 15:17:39 -0000

On 28/02/07, Todd Cary <todd at aristesoftware.com>
wrote:
> I shut the server down last evening due to power surges and when I tried
> to bring it back up, it stops at starting sendmail.  Is there a way
> around this?

Sendmail can take a looooong time to start in the absence of working
DNS, so that's worth checking. I've also seen startup problems where
the issue is with the next process/daemon to start rather than the one
that appears to be holding things up, though typically that's been
earlier in the boot process.

To discount Sendmail as the cause of your problems boot to single user
mode then...

# chkconfig sendmail off

And restart. If the system's still having trouble booting, after
Sendmail on a relatively vanilla system here I have the following
services starting...

Feb 28 09:31:41 archive sendmail: sendmail startup succeeded
Feb 28 09:31:41 archive sendmail: sm-client startup succeeded
Feb 28 09:31:41 archive gpm: gpm startup succeeded
Feb 28 09:31:42 archive bacula-sd: bacula-sd startup succeeded
Feb 28 09:31:42 archive crond: crond startup succeeded
Feb 28 09:31:42 archive munin-node: Starting Munin Node:
Feb 28 09:31:43 archive munin-node: ESC[60G
Feb 28 09:31:43 archive munin-node:
Feb 28 09:31:43 archive rc: Starting munin-node:  succeeded
Feb 28 09:31:43 archive bacula-fd: bacula-fd startup succeeded
Feb 28 09:31:43 archive bacula-dir: bacula-dir startup succeeded
Feb 28 09:31:43 archive anacron: anacron startup succeeded
Feb 28 09:31:43 archive atd: atd startup succeeded
Feb 28 09:31:44 archive messagebus: messagebus startup succeeded
Feb 28 09:31:44 archive haldaemon: haldaemon startup succeeded

You could try chkconfig-ing those off as you go to see if one of these
is the issue. Be sure to make a note of what you're disabling, and if
you need to re-enable it :)

Will.