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I have a system where sendmail deamon not running.
That is a good thing - sendmail shouldn't be running on most servers (security issue)
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But I have whole lot of sendmail processes started-up by cron process, eating up its CPU resources.
Probably because when sendmail isn't running, some folks have found that their email gets stuck on the server for one reason or another - so they schedule a cron job to push the email out.
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When I tried to startup the deamon as used in the cron executable like:"/usr/lib/sendmail -q" I get errors: (see below)
# /usr/lib/sendmail -q
hash map "Alias0": missing map file /etc/aliases.db: No such file or directory
dbm map "Alias0": missing map file /etc/aliases
Operating system error
Operating system error
Then your sendmail isn't set up correctly - it isn't finding all the files it should - the aliases and aliases.db should be links from /etc to /etc/mail on Solaris 8.
Try running the following to see if any other errors are present (your output will be different - this one shows no errors):
$ /usr/lib/sendmail -d0.1 -bt < /dev/null
Version 8.13.4
Compiled with: DNSMAP HESIOD HES_GETMAILHOST LDAPMAP LOG MAP_REGEX
MATCHGECOS MILTER MIME7TO8 MIME8TO7 NAMED_BIND NETINET NETINET6
NETUNIX NEWDB NIS PIPELINING SASLv2 SCANF SOCKETMAP STARTTLS
TCPWRAPPERS USERDB USE_LDAP_INIT
============ SYSTEM IDENTITY (after readcf) ============
(short domain name) $w = localhost
(canonical domain name) $j = localhost.localdomain
(subdomain name) $m = localdomain
(node name) $k = localhost.localdomain
========================================================
ADDRESS TEST MODE (ruleset 3 NOT automatically invoked)
Enter <ruleset> <address>
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But If I run the command like this: "/usr/lib/sendmail -q15m", then it works fine.
I believe it doesn't run fine - it's just waiting 15 minutes and then would have the same error as the others that run immediately.
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1. How to get rid of following type of processes:
Your real problem is to fix the issues with sendmail. Then the cron jobs should start working.