yum upgrade broke my mailscanner - FIXED

[Hostmaster]

<snip>

>It fixed the problem, how would you have fixed it, I look forward to
>enlightenment :)

Well, taking a look at one of my CentOS 5.3 boxes running MS,
/usr/lib/perl5/5.8.8/Scalar/Util.pm is provided by "perl-5.8.8-18.el5_3.1" - the
core Perl package on a CentOS machine.

Without knowing which repo's other than the core CentOS repo you are running, I
would have started off with checking to see if my last "yum update" had modified
Scalar/Util.pm, however regardless of which (any) third-party repo's you are
using, you should always be using yum-priorities
(http://wiki.centos.org/PackageManagement/Yum/Priorities) to protect the base.

Depending on what I found out on what had modified Scalar::Util, my next stages
from there would have been to either unpack a re-downloaded
perl-5.8.8-18.el5_3.1 RPM with rpm2cpio and try returning Scalar::Util back to
its package version, or force a re-install of the RPM back over the top.

There has been plenty of discussion both on the CentOS forums and IIRC here
regarding CPAN on RPM boxes. 
I come from a background of using Slackware before I came to RHEL, and I learnt
the hard way by installing the tarball install of MailScanner eons ago (probably
around version 4.42) on a CentOS 4 box. CPAN was used to get the perl modules
sorted for that install, and over time the problems around using CPAN in an RPM
environment just compounded themselves, especially with MailScanner updates and
system updates. I hit problems with Compress::Zlib and MailTools as many people
have, before deciding enough was enough and going back to RPM's. The process of
migrating back from a system cluttered with CPAN built perl modules to RPM's was
very, very messy, with copious use of "locate perl |xargs rpm -qf" to work out
what was currently on the filesystem and not part of a package, identifying the
correct packages and installing them. I then used a side-by-side installation of
MailScanner tarball with MailScanner RPM (the tar installation residing in /opt)
so I could iron out all of the problems before switching fully to the RPM
installation of MailScanner. I wouldn't wish anyone to have to go through the
migration that I did - it used up days of my time which could have much more
profitably been spent elsewhere.

Please, for your own sanity, avoid CPAN on RPM systems. A quick google for
"centos cpan" shows that I am not the only one who has been "educated" in the
ways of RPM based systems ;-)

Richard

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