[HLUG] Exim 4.50 on Debian 3.1 external greet_pause?

[John Hedges]

On Fri, Jan 26, 2007 at 11:53:14PM -0000, Andrew Hodgson wrote:
> Hi,
> 
>  
> 
> I have a virtual host at a data centre which I am moving stuff from home
> onto running Debian 3.1 (mainly stock packages from stable/security).  I
> have installed Exim-daemon-heavy and configured it for secondary MX for
> some domains.
> 
>  
> 
> The trouble is it seems to have implemented something similar to
> Sendmail's greet_pause feature, because it is taking around 20 seconds
> to respond externally, when on localhost it is running fine.  The only
> modification I made other than what dpkg-reconfigure exim-conf did was
> to add Clam support, but it was like this before.  I chose the Internet
> SMTP delivery option, and then mainly went through defaults from there,
> choosing split configuration (as I am very new to Exim).
> 
>  
> 
> If this goes on I may switch to using Sendmail again, but wanted to
> battle it out with another MTA to see how it went.
> 
>  
> 
> Any suggestions?
> 
> Andrew.

Hi Andrew

Maybe ident (rfc1413)? I have 'rfc1413_query_timeout = 0s' in most
configs as this has solved delays in the past (especially when using
exim as a smarthost for a pc without an ident server).

If you are using ssl there could be another problem. ssl connections
require a lot of bits from /dev/random and this is can cause a bottleneck
in some cases as the kernel can't meet the demand for random bits. I can
send you a cron script to keep entropy in /dev/random topped up if this
is the issue. You can check entropy with

cat /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail 

Cheers

John