Ryan Tomayko

ppp and initscripts conflict

If you get the following during yum upgrade:

conflict between initscripts and pppd

Remove the ppp package and then try upgrading again:

$ yum remove ppp
Is this ok [y/N]: y
Downloading Packages
Running test transaction:
Test transaction complete, Success!
Erasing: wvdial 1/3
warning: /etc/ppp/pap-secrets saved as /etc/ppp/pap-secrets.rpmsave
warning: /etc/ppp/chap-secrets saved as /etc/ppp/chap-secrets.rpmsave
Erasing: ppp 2/3
Erasing: rp-pppoe 3/3
Erased:  ppp 2.4.1-10.i386 wvdial 1.53-9.i386 rp-pppoe 3.5-2.i386
Transaction(s) Complete
$ yum upgrade
...

See this bug for more info on this problem. There should be an updated initscripts package that fixes this soon. You probably don't need the ppp package anyway. If you don't want to remove the package, this message from the yum list might be another workaround. Removing worked for me.

Upgrade Python!

Something you never want to see:

yum -y upgrade
<snip>
Completing update for ed  - 972/973
Kernel Updated/Installed, checking for bootloader
Grub found - making this kernel the default
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/bin/yum", line 30, in ?
    yummain.main(sys.argv[1:])
  File "/usr/share/yum/yummain.py", line 375, in main
    pkgaction.kernelupdate(tsInfo)
  File "/usr/share/yum/pkgaction.py", line 611, in kernelupdate
    up2datetheft.install_grub(kernel_list)
  File "/usr/share/yum/up2datetheft.py", line 13, in install_grub
    import grubcfg
  File "/usr/share/yum/grubcfg.py", line 12, in ?
    import iutil
  File "/usr/share/yum/iutil.py", line 2, in ?
    import types, os, sys, select, string, stat, signal
ImportError: No module named select

Anytime you see the words “kernel” and “traceback” in near proximity, worry. This turned out to not be a big deal but I highly recommend upgrading python before the rest of the system as Seth notes in his suggestion doc. Upgrading python under yum while it is trying to upgrade everything else is a bad idea.

IMAP

If you ran the default UW-IMAP daemon that came with Redhat 9, you will need to upgrade to dovecot or cyrus-imapd for Fedora Core 2. I'm not sure why but the RPM obsoletes work out such that cyrus-imapd becomes the new imap daemon. It is supposedly very much more powerful than dovecot but it is also completely backward-incompatible. I removed cyrus-imapd and installed dovecot:

yum remove cyrus-imapd
yum install dovecot
chkconfig dovecot on
service dovecot start

At this point you should be close to where you were with UW-IMAP. I ran into some issues with IMAP folders (dovecot seems to only pick up your inbox from /var/spool/mail). The dovecot wiki has some information on correcting this. I did something like this for each user:

[back stuff up..]
cd $HOME
mv $(cat .mailboxlist) ./mail/
mv .mailboxlist ./mail/.subscriptions

(This only works with single level folder hierarchies. For more complex setups you will need to adjust appropriately.) Once completed, you should be able to see all of your folders in

Unsolved Mysteries

OpenLDAP changed their damn storage format and you need to slapcat and slapadd to get back to where you were. Were we where we were, it would make life much easier because now I can't seem to log in with old user credentials any more. I only spent a couple of minutes on this so it probably isn't that big of a deal.

Things That Made Me Happy

Apache upgraded flawlessly.

Dovecot is about 600% more performant than UW-IMAP. this could be the 2.6 kernel or something.. I don't care. I'm happy :)