sendmail anyone?

[Brown, David (Test Dept)]

Calling all CINLUG gurus!

Background:
I have a server that I simply edited the DS (Smart Relay) to point to a load balancer in front of a bunch of corporate Exchange servers. I have my web service setup to send mail messages to the local sendmail daemon and then they get relayed to the corporate server. This has worked for years. Recently there was some sort of issue with either the network name server, firewall(s), load balancer, or exchange server itself which caused all mail to get "connection refused" messages. Unfortunately when this happened it caused sendmail to delay for a very loooooong time before giving up and queueing the mail. Even when executing a simple text mail from the command line with the command "echo hello | mail -s hello doc.brown at rolls-royce.com" it hangs for about a minute or more before returning you to the prompt. Needless to say, when this happens it also breaks a bunch of web-based scripts that similarly hang when they send mail to the local sendmail.
Question:
Is there a way to configure sendmail to not delay or wait for a response for so long?

Thanks for your time,

David (Doc) Brown
Rolls-Royce Electronics Engineer
P.O. Box 420 / Mail Stop S15
Indianapolis, IN 46206-0420
+1 317 230 3623 / Tel
+1 317 230 6152 / Fax
+1 317 753 9752 / Mobile
doc.brown at rolls-royce.com<mailto:doc.brown at rolls-royce.com> / Email

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