Here's one for the archives (because I've asked about this here).
     I've been suffering from a long-standing (as in 2+ years) problem with 
sendmail taking a VERY long time to start during bootup. The delay at that 
line during the bootup logging has always been some multiple of 2 minutes 
which suggested some sort of network time-out but, try as I might, I couldn't 
figure out what was wrong.
     The problem also manifested itself as certain X programs that took an 
inordinately long time (some multiple of 2 minutes, again) to launch.
     Sometimes the problems would only show when I was one someone else's 
network but, in Red Hat 9, the failures happened everywhere. So it was time 
to try (yet again) to find out what was configured wrong somewhere.
     A few minutes ago I was searching at http://www.linuxquestions.org/ and 
finally located the answer. I've made the change, rebooted and tested various 
things and the problem seems to be solved with no negative side effects. 
Hooray! (But, to be honest, I haven't booted on a "alien" network so my 
celebration may be premature.)
     The problem (at least here on my own network) was in my /etc/hosts file. 
I've included the "slow" and "fast" contents below but, basically, the answer 
was to add ".localdomain" to all the entries (in my local domain).

SLOW starting sendmail, /etc/hosts follows:
# Do not remove the following line, or various programs
# that require network functionality will fail.
127.0.0.1	localhost.localdomain localhost
192.168.1.1	firewall
192.168.1.10	gort
192.168.1.11	klaatu
192.168.1.102	bobby
192.168.1.201	printer

FAST starting sendmail, /etc/hosts follows:
# Do not remove the following line, or various programs
# that require network functionality will fail.
127.0.0.1	localhost.localdomain localhost
192.168.1.1	firewall.localdomain firewall
192.168.1.10	gort.localdomain gort
192.168.1.11	klaatu.localdomain klaatu
192.168.1.102	bobby.localdomain bobby
192.168.1.201	printer.localdomain printer

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