Re: Ill advised blundering = nasty mess
On Wed, 28 Sep 2011 00:24:22 -0500
Harry Putnam <harry.put3@gmail.com> wrote:
> Due to unbridled personal bungling, I've created a nasty mess while
> installing sendmail.
>
I've never been near sendmail, so I can't help directly with the
problem.
I've seen the other replies, and:
1) If you need a mail server but have no previous experience, have heard
of sendmail and are unaware of anything else, then yes, I'll join in the
recommendations that you pick a different one. It is notoriously the
most difficult to configure.
2) If you have a specific reason to install sendmail, then do it.
Answers to IT questions which start "well, if I were you I wouldn't try
to fix this, I'd do something completely different" are sometimes
unhelpful, though it is often difficult to guess how much someone
knows, and they may be unaware that there is a method which is usually
considered better and/or easier.
To press ahead, try using dpkg direct, which is more difficult and
dangerous than apt, precisely because it doesn't usually stop you
shooting off a foot. Sometimes that really is what you want to do.
I don't use it often, so start with the man page and figure it out.
Forcible, unconditional removal of something is not too difficult, as
I recall.
But sometimes it doesn't work; your error message comes from dpkg, and
that *may* mean it will still stop you, or it may just mean that apt
wasn't prepared to kick it hard enough.
It happened to me once, oddly enough also with a mail server, exim4. I
was upgrading a distribution and was not warned to throw away my old
configuration file, which prevented full installation of all parts, and
configuration of one of them. Aptitude was helpless, and even dpkg,
invoked with extreme prejudice and maximum swearing, wouldn't remove it
cleanly.
I eventually resorted to reading the file list and hunting them down
one by one, with manual deletion, and I could then reinstall from
scratch. You may have to do that. If necessary, dpkg -i <package>.deb
will install a .deb without a lot of apt's caution. Use it carefully,
when you are sure dependencies are already in place.
Best of luck. Sometimes it comes down to that.
--
Joe
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