broken /var

["David E. Fox" <dfox@tsoft.net>]

had a big problem this afternoon - had some serious issues with the
reiserfs on /dev/hda1 (an oldish 1.6 gig maxtor), ended up not being
able to fsck it to an orderly state. Had to redo the whole fs, (should
have made a backup) and grab a /var from a ubuntu disk. Obviously,
ubuntu is not debian, but their /var structure should be similar enough
that I can fix the problems after the fact.

2 major problems remain:

using postfix, this has been working for years, ran postfix check to
recreate the missing directories, and my machine
(m206-157.dsl.tsoft.com) is getting the mail fine. I just can't *send*
mail. Postfix tells me that there is an unknown transport for the mail
I try to send, and holds it in the queue.

The other issue - I no longer have a working repository for dpkg
describing what files are installed. Is there a way to recreate it
without a reinstall? I noticed that aptitude upgrade was fetching down
a number of things, but as I don't know what it's upgrading *from* I
don't know if I can trust it. Another thing - aptitude update was going
very slowly and experiencing connection time outs periodically during
the execution, so I don't think I can trust it. On the other hand, dpkg
--get-selections gives me a number of things, but honestly I think
those where what Ubuntu put there? Obviously, that is not what I want.

I'm hoping to not have to reinstall this thing :).



-- 
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David E. Fox                              Thanks for letting me
dfox@tsoft.com                            change magnetic patterns
dfox@m206-157.dsl.tsoft.com               on your hard disk.
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