yum upgrade broke my mailscanner - FIXED

[Simon Jones]

2009/10/12 Garrod Alwood <admin at lorodoes.com>:
> My question is why run yum on a live box that is running fine? Always test first before you yum on a live box.
>
> Garrod Alwood
> IT Consultant
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Hostmaster <Hostmaster at computerservicecentre.com>
> Sent: Monday, October 12, 2009 10:38 AM
> To: MailScanner discussion <mailscanner at lists.mailscanner.info>
> Subject: RE: yum upgrade broke my mailscanner - FIXED
>
> <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 MailS
>
>
> [The entire original message is not included]
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It wasn't actually a production server, I was switching it from
physical hardware to a VPS on our Xen platform - got it all working
and tested it then ran the updates (excluding kernel updates) and
that's when i got the error on restarting mailscanner.  Just thought
it might have been a useful post to someone having a similar problem.