Re: [gentoo-user] minimal / stand-alone mail daemon?

[Mick]

On Monday 16 Jan 2017 16:51:16 Ian Zimmerman wrote:
> Hello again,
>
> it's no secret that I'm partial to the Exim MTA and I love to teach it
> new tricks.  However running Exim on a workstation (mobile or not) is
> serious overkill.  Exim compares to sendmail in power but also in the
> complexity of its configuration.  Most of this power is wasted when all
> it's doing is delivering output from cron and at.  Perhaps more
> importantly, though, it tends to assume its host is always online and
> DNS is available to resolve arbitrary domain names; this can cause
> misbehavior when the assumption fails.  I just made a change in the
> configuration and suddenly my desktop started stalling for 20 seconds on
> boot; my investigation, which was longer than I'd have liked, showed
> that it was due to dnsmasq trying to answer a query from Exim - and
> failing because the network interface was not fully up when the query
> was made.

I don't have exim installed anywhere at present to try it out, but here's some 
ideas I would look further into:

Assuming the reverse DNS lookups are not that many (i.e. some local hosts 
only) have you tried adding them to the /etc/hosts file?  I hope this would 
speed things up.

Another thing to try is edit the openrc start up script for exim and add a 
'needed' dependency for ethernet.  It will hopefully wait until the network is 
up, before it launches exim.
-- 
Regards,
Mick