unqualified host name; sleeping for retry

After a fresh installation of FreeBSD today, I’d noticed that my boot up time was suffering due to this message which consistently appears:

Jul 19 16:58:38 freebsd sm-mta[1097]: My unqualified host name (freebsd) unknown; sleeping for retry
Jul 19 16:59:38 freebsd sm-mta[1097]: unable to qualify my own domain name (freebsd) -- using short name
Jul 19 16:59:38 freebsd sm-msp-queue[1100]: My unqualified host name (freebsd) unknown; sleeping for retry
Jul 19 17:00:38 freebsd sm-msp-queue[1100]: unable to qualify my own domain name (freebsd) -- using short 

As you can see, this machine that I’ve created does have the very original hostname of freebsd.

What the error message is telling us is that I need to fully qualify my hostname. Editing /etc/rc.conf you can change the hostname value to include this information. The top line of my rc.conf now reads as follows:

hostname="freebsd.home"

No more slow boot times; because of this problem, at least.