Starting MTA: without network takes a long time?

Question

Whenever I start up my netbook without an internet connection, I might as well be using windows because it takes forever to start up waiting for "Starting MTA:" which eventually times out and continues my boot process. I'm using exim4, and I don't really want to completely get rid of it (even though I'm the only user on this machine) because some of the mails come from programs with some information that can be helpful.

I tried to change a few settings (since this is just for local mail to user accounts), but it didn't seem to make any difference (setting it to use minimal DNS gave me some error, I'll set it up again and see what it said)

How can I get this to just not take so long when I don't have a network connection? Honestly it shouldn't even need one, since it's all local mail from this machine to this machine.

Linux s10 3.2.0-1-686-pae #1 SMP Sun Feb 5 23:52:49 UTC 2012 i686 GNU/Linux

hostname --fqdn did not return a fully qualified name, dc_minimaldns will not 
work. Please fix your /etc/hosts setup.

I don't know what's wrong with my hosts set up. This is after running dpkg-configure exim4-config and setting up minimaldns as if I had Dial-on-Demand. hostname --fqdn returns s10

/etc/hosts:

127.0.0.1   localhost
127.0.1.1   s10

# The following lines are desirable for IPv6 capable hosts
::1     ip6-localhost ip6-loopback
fe00::0 ip6-localnet
ff00::0 ip6-mcastprefix
ff02::1 ip6-allnodes
ff02::2 ip6-allrouters

nyov · Answer

As the error states, hostname --fqdn did not return a fully qualified name.
A fully qualified name usually consists of the hostname followed by the DNS domain name (the part after the first dot): host.example.com

Your /etc/hosts only contains localhost and s10. To fix the issue, add a domain name.
Adding a .local, for a non-existing domain, should be enough.

127.0.0.1   localhost
127.0.1.1   s10.local

[...]

Take care to not remove or change the first line. localhost should always resolve to 127.0.0.1, or things might break unexpectedly.

However, you can add as many domains as you like to one IP, or different IPs in your local subnet (127.0.0.0/8) - if you need one for a local test-webserver, to "null-route" some adserver (free adblock), etc.:

# my customized /etc/hosts, yay!
127.0.0.1   localhost
127.0.1.1   s10.local s11.mydomain.local freedomain.myspace.local

127.2.2.2   another.service.local
127.9.9.9   googleads.g.doubleclick.net
127.9.9.9   graph.facebook.com

Elshan · Answer

May be wrong configuration will cause this,

try to reconfigure using dpkg-reconfigure exim4-config

8.5.3. Configuring the Exim4 Mail Transport Agent https://www.debian.org/releases/stable/i386/ch08s05.html.en

Starting MTA: without network takes a long time?

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