Upgrading Woes

Well, having looked a little more into the Cyrus IMAP thing, I’ve decided that the upgrade sufficiently FUBARred the mail handing stuff. Sendmail is working as expected, and for local mail, things are good. But, to get mail via POP or IMAP, there’s not a chance in hell without some serious time commitment and lots of configuration/upgrade changes.

At this point in time, it would appear as though the upgrade didn’t completely upgrade a few packages, because reinstalling/upgrading the Cyrus packages result in failed dependencies. Now, since most everything else is working as anticipated, this isn’t a huge problem. But, it’s a problem…and therefore bugs me. So, I decided to run the upgrade on the upgrade, just to see what happens.

Well, that worked — and didn’t take very long. It did actually run the upgrade on the pieces I needed (the ones which were being complained about). But, there was another, more serious, issue that developed…

The network card also started not working in this server as well!

Just like the other one, it’s got a link light. The primary difference in this upgrade process — it’s a PCI NIC…identical to the one which IS working on the other server.

It was at this time that I decided to actually reinstall from scratch and preserve the configurations and such (by backing them up to a different location).

I have a feeling that this is somewhat related to the 2.6 kernel, although I could be wrong (and certainly have been in the past). We shall see what happens after the install completes…

On the bright side, though, it could be worse — at least it’s the secondary machine and not the router/firewall. That’d be a whole lot worse. The only problem now is that there are NFS mounts on the server which is now not on the network…but those aren’t system mounts (with the exception of /home) so we should be fine for a while.

If this thing goes well, I really think I’ll do the same thing on the router box. Of course, that’s much more touchy…because it truly brings the network down. But, I really should do some other miscellaneous hardware upgrades and whatnot with that machine…so I think I’ll hold off at least for a while with that beast.

As I write this, it would appear as though the install process is about 20% complete… I will update again later in the day as necessary.

10PM Update

Well, the reinstall went just fine, without any major problems. In fact, it did fix some of the other problems (including the network card thing). Why, I’m not exactly sure, but it’s working for now and that’s all that matters.

The install didn’t, however, take care of the Cyrus IMAP problem. It’s becoming apparent that I’m going to have to manually compile either the new version of UW IMAP (which is what I’d used in the past) or Cyrus-IMAP to get this thing resolved. The RPM files just aren’t cutting it…so it’s time for some more drastic measures.

So, the battle is not yet over; on the other hand, it’s just going to boil down to how badly I really need to download mail to a client instead of logging in manually.

So we’ll take it from there and see what happens.

Until next time…

This post was upgraded to the MZ Online Blog on 8/25/07