Uninstalling exim (when turning it off is not enough)

[Paul Howarth]

On Tue, 2005-07-26 at 20:51 -0400, neidorff wrote:
> On 7/26/05, Paul Howarth <paul at city-fan.org> wrote:
> > neidorff wrote:
> > > Hi all,
> > >
> > > A recap:  I'm running FC3.  I used qmailrocks.org to install qmail,
> > > spamassassin, clamav and many associated packages.  I'm very happy
> > > with the system.
> > >
> > > I also had (turned it off) yum running on a daily basis to update my
> > > system.  Little did I know that it would install new pacakages on its
> > > own!  So, what happened was that yum installed exim and mail stopped.
> > >
> > > A very nice person on this list, as I was trying to debug this mess
> > > (and blaming the problem incorrectly on a perl update) noted that exim
> > > was running.  I immediately stopped exim and mail is once again being
> > > processed through qmail, spamassassin and clamav.
> > >
> > > But, I still have a problem.  Something that exim installed is
> > > blocking pop3 access from kmail.  (I can see my local mail using
> > > squirrelmail or pine)  The easy solution would be to uninstall exim
> > > (rpm -e), but when I try to do that, rpm complains that:
> > >
> > > error: Failed dependencies:
> > >         /usr/sbin/sendmail is needed by (installed) redhat-lsb-1.3-4.i386
> > >         smtpdaemon is needed by (installed) mdadm-1.6.0-2.i386
> > >         smtpdaemon is needed by (installed) mutt-1.4.1-10.i386
> > >         smtpdaemon is needed by (installed) fetchmail-6.2.5-7.fc3.1.i386
> > > I understand what the error is telling me.  Moving /usr/bin/sendmail
> > > out of the way is no problem.  But smtpdaemon has me stumped.  I
> > > looked at the list of files that exim installed (rpm -q --filesbypkg
> > > exim) but I can't find a reference to smtpdaemon.  My question is:
> > > what do I do to get rid of exim (the smtpdaemon part, I think) without
> > > disrupting what I have installed?
> > 
> > smtpdaemon is a "virtual" rpm dependency that can be satisfied by any
> > MTA rpm package. Currently it is being satisfied by exim on your system.
> > Ideally you should have a qmail RPM package that also "provides" this
> > dependency. You would have to build an RPM of qmail yourself though in
> > order to satisfy that dependency, due to qmail's licensing issues.
> > 
> > In the absence of a qmail RPM providing this dependency, installing any
> > of exim, sendmail or postfix should be enough to keep RPM happy. So if
> > you install sendmail or postfix, you'll be able to get rid of exim.
> > 
> > I have my doubts that exim is responsible for your pop issues though,
> > since the MTA and the pop server are completely different things. Which
> > pop server are you using?
> > 
> I'm sorry to give a flaky answer, but whatever pop server is installed
> with qmailrocks.  Courier does imap in this setup, I think it also
> does pop.  I did a manual login to the pop server
> (#telnet localhost 110)
> and was able to successfully log into my account and list my mail.  I
> assume that means that the pop server is working properly?

It's at least working for localhost. It might not be listening on other
interfaces.

What's the output of:
# netstat -lpn | grep 110

Paul.
-- 
Paul Howarth <paul at city-fan.org>