General Problems

Rick Stevens rstevens at vitalstream.com
Tue Mar 16 18:37:27 UTC 2004


Mugleston, Brad wrote:
> Thanks Rick, I'll answer below.
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Rick Stevens [mailto:rstevens at vitalstream.com]
> Sent: Tuesday, March 16, 2004 10:17 AM
> To: Getting started with Red Hat Linux
> Subject: Re: General Problems
> 
> 
> Mugleston, Brad wrote:
> 
>>I upgraded to RH9 a little while ago and everything was running fine.  Then Xiaman Evolution (the email program) stopped sending emails - I was getting a sendmail error).
> 
> 
> Would've been nice if you had investigated the sendmail error first.
> The fix would've been a lot easier, I suspect.
> 
> *******
> I did - or at least I tried to.  The Red Hat list couldn't give me any suggestions and the Xiaman list just suggested I upgrade as the version of Evolution that came with Red Hat was old.

Hmmm.  Strange.  Well, I administer a sendmail-based system with about
50,000 users over 10,000 domains.  I can answer a lot of sendmail
problems.

[snip]
>> All the other email programs (pine, Mozilla, etc) worked just fine.
>>
>>Someone suggested I upgrade to the newest Evolution program and I've had nothing but problems.  Seems that if  you upgrade to Evolution you also upgrade to have Xiaman as your desktop and it replaces everything with it's own choices of software.
> 
> 
> Brilliant.  Lovely.  Let's hear it for Ximian.
> 
> 
>> On top of all that Evolution still will not deliver email.
> 
> 
> What's the error?
> 
> ********
> Error while performing operation:
> sendmail exited with status 64: mail not sent

Error 64 is "EX_USAGE", meaning that the command line sent to sendmail
was bogus.  I'd like to see what your /var/log/maillog file says about
what was attempted.

[snip]
>>Well, then I had a problem using Mozilla - stopped printing then the plug-in's all went away.
> 
> 
> Sounds like they wiped out your /usr/lib/mozilla link.

/usr/lib/mozilla is usually a symlink to a /usr/lib/mozilla-version
directory.  You should "ls -l /usr/lib/m*" and see what the link for
mozilla is.  Then check the destination directory and verify that its
"plugins" directory isn't empty.  You may want to check one of the other
mozilla directories (depending on which version of mozilla you have
installed) and possibly reset the link to that directory.

[snip]
>>Anyone have any suggestions?  If I were to re-install RedHat 9 what kinds of problems would I have (I've gone through quite a few up2dates and Xiaman updates).
> 
> 
> The same danger you have with any upgrade.  Back up your data and do a
> fresh install, but do NOT let the system reformat your disk partitions.
> Leave them alone (that should leave your user data alone for the most
> part, but there's no guarantee) and simply do an install.
> 
> As for the updates, I just pull all of the "i386" and "noarch" update
> RPMs (except for the ones that start with "kernel-") off one of the
> mirrors (I use kernel.org's mirror) and stick them on a CD.  I do a
> mass update by:
> 
> 	# mount /dev/cdrom
> 	# rpm -Fvh /mnt/cdrom/*.rpm
> 
> I then pull down the kernel RPM I want and "rpm -ivh kernel-*.rpm".
> Note that the latest iptables RPM probably won't install until you
> upgrade the kernel as they have a dependency.  So, update the kernel
> then update the iptables RPM (if any).
> 
> ************
> OK, I've used Red Hat since 5.2 and have had my share of wonderful learning experiences.  Problem is now I've got so much into the information on the hard drives and setup's I really hate to go backwards anymore.  But it's always a great learning experience.

Well, as I said, you can do a fresh install but do NOT let the system
reformat the partitions.  That will preserve what's already there (your
data) but reinstall all of RH9.  You should still back up your
/etc/passwd, /etc/shadow and /etc/group files, though, as the new
install may wipe the old ones out.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
- Rick Stevens, Senior Systems Engineer     rstevens at vitalstream.com -
- VitalStream, Inc.                       http://www.vitalstream.com -
-                                                                    -
-   Whoever said "Money can't buy friends" obviously never brought   -
-                        donuts to the office.                       -
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