FreeBSD 11 - My unqualified host name (<hostname>) unknown; sleeping for retry

Symptoms

- Slow booting
- Some/All of the following messages during boot
- Some/All of the following messages in /var/log/messages
- Some/All of the following messages in /var/log/maillog

Starting sendmail_submit.
<date/time> <hostname> sm-mta[615]: My unqualified host name (<hostname>) unknown; sleeping for retry
<date/time> <hostname> sm-mta[615]: unable to qualify my own domain name (<hostname>) -- using short name
Starting sendmail_msp_queue.
<date/time> <hostname> sm-mta[615]: My unqualified host name (<hostname>) unknown; sleeping for retry
<date/time> <hostname> sm-mta[615]: unable to qualify my own domain name (<hostname>) -- using short name

Issue

In my case, during installation I neglected to use a FQDN when it asked me for a hostname, as was expected. This caused sendmail_submit and sendmail_msp_queue to do error correction during boot which increased boot time and produced the messages above.

Solution

In the /etc/rc.conf file, the hostname value was simply listed as "<hostname>" where it expected it to be "<hostname.fqdn>"

Example
/etc/rc.conf
hostname="FreeBSD11.example.com"

Comments

kace said…
Settung the hostname in rc.conf is only half the fix, though. Should also put that hostname into "/etc/hosts" as an alias pointing to 127.0.0.1. (Though, not required if the hostname resolves via DNS.)

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