Hi all,

Well, I managed to somehow break my mail configuration and I would like to know what is the best way to fix it.

I have the following directories in /etc:
mail
postfix
sendmail

First I have to ask if anyone knows whether the mail directory is redundant here or was it created by postfix or sendmail?

Should I delete these and try to re-install?

The rest of my system is working great so I want to avoid a complete re-installation.

Peter

well it'd be a start to know whether you are even using sendmail OR postfix...

Hi,

Well, after doing a pgrep on both, sendmail shows an active process.

right, ok so you are using sendmail. that's step one. step two is to actually tell us what is going wrong, what yo uare experiencing etc... if you want help, you really need to tell us somethign useful to work on in the first place.

Hi Chris,

I am receiving the following error message:

The message could not be sent because the server rejected the sender's e-mail address. The sender's e-mail address was 'pab@linux.cxm'. Subject 'test message', Account: 'linux - pab', Server: 'mail.linux.cxm', Protocol: SMTP, Server Response: '554 5.0.0 rewrite: excessive recursion (max 50), ruleset canonify', Port: 25, Secure(SSL): No, Server Error: 554, Error Number: 0x800CCC78

I have tried:
sendmail -bt
sendmail -I
postfix -v

but they all give me:

fatal: bad numerical configuration: with some paths

Peter

Basically, what I am looking for is some info regarding what happens when removing software that was originally installed by the distro so that if need be I can, if possible, simply remove the problem and re-install the software but without affecting the rest of the system.

Are any of the above packages installed by the distro, in case of emergency, creating dependencies that would result in a total system failure if removed?

What packages should one avoid or when should someone have to take the decision to simply re-install the distro that they are using?

I think that these are some of the fundamentals that are taken for granted when using windows. I remember that windows 3.1 was very easy to solve problems because each package was usually in a directory of it's own along with associated dll's. As for XP, the idea of correcting software problems associated with problematic installations is more of uninstall reinstall.

Peter

well you can just remove sendmail if you wish (and if you ARE using sendmail then there is no need for postfix whatsoever). You'll hit a bunch of dependencies but if you are planning in installing somethign in it's place the those deps will be satisfied again before it is a relevant concern. there are plenty of critical packages, kernel, glibc, sysvinit, bash etc... but there's really no logic in uninstalling software to just reinstall it again. you can force a reinstallation over the existing copy, so the software is never actaully removed at any stage, but this still isn't the kind of methodology you would use to resolve a problem. not least because many times RPM is kind enough to backup files in case you need them again, so if you b0rked a config file, it may come back into action after the reinstall.

Hi Chris,

Thank you for the info.
While I too don't like the idea of reinstalling sw I base my thoughts on the amount of time that I have been trying to solve the problem at hand. Actually I installed sendmail only recently because I find that easier to work with than postfix.
I think that I may have broken postfix by using linuxconf and trying to make some changes that way. Then I found a post somewhere that said that linuxconf actually creates a problem in postfix.

Before I do uninstall both postfix and sendmail, do you happen know which program created the /etc/mail directory?

Thank in advance.
Peter

you used linuxconf? no wonder something has broke...

i don't believe /etc/mail was created by either, sendmail uses it and postfix doesn't i don't believe, but it's part of the standard filesystem, not owned by anyone inparticular

Just a note. I am using Mandriva 2006. I have a popular problem with installing some of my programs. Specifically My Thunderbird install bombs at first install. Apparently there is someting wrong with the script that sets up Thunderbird during the install process. I found that if I removed it using mandriva's software management and then reinstall it it installs fine afterward. So YES you can remove certain programs and reinstall them to see if that will fix them. As long as you don't remove any dependent libs or anything there should be no problem.