Exim is probably trying to do one of:
1. Trying to do reverse DNS lookup on the remote IP address, and the DNS
servers are taking very long to answer or not answering at all.
2. Trying to do an rfc1413 ident query, and you've recently
added/modified/upgraded some ort of firewall which instead of returning
a refusal or rejection of the ident packets, is silently dropping them.
To troubleshoot
1. do 'exim -d11 -bh 1.2.3.4'
and see where they delay is
2. add
rfc1413_hosts = ! *
and/or
lookup_hosts = ! *
to your config to disable one/both of these functions, and see which
causes the delay to go away.
After you've determine that, you can either keep the relevant option
disabled (if you dont need/want it), or fix whatever is causing those
types of lookups to be delayed
On Sat, 24 Nov 2001, Gary Ferrer wrote:
> Exim has recently developed a problem that I cant figure out. The exim logs show no problem. This just started occurring today, I haven't touched exim or anything else on the system. When my email client tries to connect to the server on port 25, it times out! Once it worked after about 5 minutes of waiting. If I try to telnet into the port, it connects but I don't get the normal message:
>
> "220 server.xxx.net ESMTP Exim 3.16 #1 Sat, 24 Nov 2001 11:58:33 -0800"
>
> i just get:
>
> "Escape character is '^]'." Internal mail delivery test (exim -d9 user@???) work fine and get delivered.
>
> The process list looks like this:
>
> "exim 8648 1 0 12:28:16 ? 0:00 /usr/lib/sendmail -bd -q15m"
>
> I start exim from /etc/init.d/sendmail. I'm wondering if I have to make changes to the init file because it's very sendmail specific. None the less, it's been working quite well until now. Where should I be looking?
>
> Thanks.
>
> PS: Please reply to email directly as I'm not on the list.
>
> Gary Ferrer
> gary@???
>
>
>
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