very slow boot (newbie)

[Barnaby Scott]

Many thanks to all who have helped me on this one - I won't post a 
message in response to every suggestion, but they have all helped - 
thank you!

It turns out it was sendmail causing the delay, so now my /etc/rc.comf 
reads:

hostname="frankbruno"
ifconfig_re0="DHCP"
keymap="uk.iso"
linux_enable="YES"
moused_enable="YES"
saver="logo"
usbd_enable="YES"
sendmail_enable="NONE"

(Someone asked what was in this file). The last line that I have just 
added does cure the problem. But...

...it does not cure the problem for me if I decide that I do want 
sendmail! I could cross that bridge when I come to it, but I would 
prefer to gain some insight here if anyone can bear any more on this topic.

Adding
127.0.0.1	frankbruno
to /etc/hosts did not cure the problem. Could that be because the lookup 
that causes the delay is a reverse one? If so, it would be trying to 
find a name for 192.168.0.4 (I think that's the one I have been getting 
recently) which is still not in hosts.

I would rather not mess with the IP allocation if possible - having it 
automatic is much more useful and means I cannot create condradictory 
records in different places.

Looking in /var/run/dmesg.boot turned up nothing obvious to me at least, 
booting in Safe Mode made no difference, and verbose logging turned up 
nothing.

However, I did discover a tip posted a couple of years ago, and that was 
to press ^T when the boot stalled. God knows what this does, but it 
turned up the following response:

load: 0.85 cmd:sendmail 454 [kqread] 0.00u 0.01s 0% 1912k

I thinks that answers all the things that were suggested - can anyone 
see a way of reinstating sendmail without the stalled boot process, and 
without having to reserve specific IP addresses for each computer?

Barnaby Scott