hoststat(1M)

hoststat, purgestat -- list the status of the last mail transaction with all remote hosts

Synopsis

/etc/mail/hoststat

/etc/mail/purgestat

Description

The hoststat utility causes sendmail(1M) to print its persistent host status, enabled with the sendmail HostStatusDirectory option. Internally, sendmail maintains status information about network hosts. For example, it stores whether a host is reachable, or is refusing connections. The HostStatusDirectory option tells sendmail that it should save this information externally, and also specifies the directory where that information will be stored on disk. If sendmail has multiple children processes running, this option may be used to ensure that the children have access to this pool of host information.

The output from hoststat is a table in the following format:

   hostname    how_long_ago    results

The table will contain one row for each host that has its status saved. The table columns contain the following:

hostname: The name of the host that was connected to, which may be an MX record. A hostname prefixed with an asterisk indicates that the status file is locked and currently being updated.
how_long_ago: Shows how long ago this status record was updated, printed in the form DD+HH:MM:SS, where DD is the number of days, HH is hours, MM is minutes and SS is seconds. If the time of last update was less than one day ago, the DD+ is not printed.
results: Shows the results of the last connection attempt, failure, or success. If no result was stored, No status available is printed. If a result was stored, the SMTP reply code, and the text of the message generated by the other side are displayed.

The purgestat utility causes sendmail to purge all the host-status information saved under the directory specified by the HostStatusDirectory option. This prevents new sendmail processes from loading it, but does not prevent existing processes from using the status information that they already have.

The sendmail configuration file where the HostStatusDirectory option is set is /etc/sendmail.cf.

hoststat is a synonym for the -bh command line switch for sendmail, while purgestat is a synonym for the -bH command-line switch.

Files

/etc/sendmail.cf

References

sendmail(1M)