Sendmail 8.11.1 Release Notes

4 Known Problems, Limitations, and Fixes
This chapter discusses the known problems, workarounds, fixes, and defects closed in
this release of Sendmail.
Known Problems and Workarounds
The following are the known problems in this release of Sendmail:
• Sendmail uses identd, an optional authentication tool to find the user id for a given
connection established with a remote machine. identd invokes some kernel services
which hold the system resources for a long time. This affects the performance of
Sendmail when there are large number of active TCP connections. The system
appears hung during this timeframe.
In order to resolve this problem, do the following:
1. Disable identd by modifying the following entry in the sendmail.cf file:
#O Timeout.ident=5s
as
O Timeout.ident=0s
Now you need to kill and restart Sendmail.
2. To disable identd, perform the following steps:
a. Edit the /etc/inetd.conf file and comment out the ident line by placing a
‘#’ in the first column as follows:
#ident stream tcp wait bin /usr/lbin/identd identd
b. Force inetd to re-read the inetd.conf file by executing ‘/usr/sbin/inetd
-c’ in the command line.
NOTE: identd is not distributed with this release of Sendmail. However if the
system already contains an identd, you may encounter the above problem.
• If you specify a new location/file for the PidFile option in the sendmail.cffile
and try killing Sendmail, the new file which does not contain any entries will be
read by Sendmail instead of the default one. Therefore, Sendmail will not be killed.
When you try restarting Sendmail, an error message is displayed.
In order to resolve this problem, kill Sendmail before changing the PidFile option
in the sendmail.cf file. You can then start Sendmail after making the changes in
the sendmail.cf file. By doing this, the Pids will be written to the new file.
• Sendmail used to add other user’s address in “Diagnostic-code” in warning
messages under abnormal conditions, when the server connections are reset in the
Known Problems and Workarounds 27