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Bad idea--Resolve a sendmail issue with DSL and PPPoE
Authored by: BraindeadMac on Mar 07, '03 07:55:19AM

Uh this is a bad idea. The ping -c 1 command will wait until the ping has returned; if the network isn't up for some reason, then it waits until ping times out. Not sure what the timeout period is for ping, probably 15 or 30 seconds, something like that.

It's also not a "good" solution as it doesn't use the proper tool for the job. Looking at what you've done, I'm not even sure your ping does anything that should make sendmail work. The fact that your network is working better now may just be fortuitous. Remember, the Sendmail script in System/Library/StartupItems/Sendmail/ just starts sendmail the first time. Once started it should run in the background as a deamon (that's what -bd does). But sendmail will have to do some name resolution at some point, which is just what your ping does. You haven't told us how your system does name resolution either (do you run your own DNS server or get one from outside) or what sendmail errors you were getting previously. Is sendmail acting as a send and receive mailer or a send only mailer? There are about a thousand reasons for sendmail to not behave as expected.

If sendmail really does "give up too quickly" (unlikely) you could force sendmail to reprocess queues by changing q1h to q5m or something like that.

You can make sure your ppp connection is "up"; you can use pppd to do this. There are a lot of "pppisup" scripts floating around out there and I've seen at least one for jaguar. I don't use ppp myself anymore, although I am contemplating switching to SBC DSL when I move in a few months.



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