[NTLUG:Discuss] Dangerous Newbie Question

[Chris J Albertson]

I'm still a newbie but have amassed enough knowledge to be very dangerous.
You'll be able to see this by my most recent problem.

I was trying to get LDAP set up on my Mandrake 8.0 box. I was having
difficulty doing this so I decided to upgrade OpenLDAP to the newest
version. Upon doing the ./configure of the install process, it told me
that my version of BDB was too old. So, I upgraded that.
Once I did that, the ./configure told me that BDB was still too old.
However, it was not.
After some research, I took some of the file out of the new BDB directory
and overwrote them into the directories where the old files of the same
name were.

At this point, OpenLDAP worked. But.... postfix when to hell. I got an
error I could not resolve and I must assume that the BDB "upgrade" broke
it.
It said that private/local was sending a string data when it unexpectedly
stopped. Then, postfix/master killed local with a signal 11. This repeated
thousands of times. This was in the warnings log.
When I issued mailq, I found that postfix was receiving mail fine, but
could not route it... (my interpretation). It said that no mail transport
provider was found. Each message said this. They would all just sit in the
queue.

I ended up doing a backup and reinstall of mandrake. (Good practice) I
lost the battle because I need to keep my email running. I really hate
doing that because I want to solve the problems rather than do the
microsoft reinstall thing. It helps me learn this OS faster.

Do you guys have any ideas of what I could have done to fix this? What
diagnostics could I have run to get more info on the problem. Where am I
not looking?

In addition, I couldn't run any RPM functions. It would shoot me a
segmentation fault every time and produced a core... which I don't know
how to read. I would try to query the RPM database, seg fault.

-- 
Chris J Albertson
alb at chrisalbertson.com
http://www.chrisalbertson.com