The Answer Gang

By Jim Dennis, Karl-Heinz Herrmann, Breen, Chris, and... (meet the Gang) ... the Editors of Linux Gazette... and You!

---

Quota needs update, help!

a place for everything and everything in its place...

From Breman

Answered By: Thomas Adam, John Karns, Ben Okopnik

May I ask you some questions below:

I have installed SuSe Linux 6.4 as a mail server. The current version of quota is 2.11

[Thomas] Quota support is kernel and user-land. Therefore I can only assume that you are referring to the userland tools. Currently the version is at 3.12, available here:

https://puzzle.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/linuxquota/quota-3.12.tar.gz

How to update to the old version? please give me steps.

[Thomas] It's a case of removing the old quota tools and installing the new one. There's a number of ways you can do this. The INSTALL file within the tar file tells you all, and it should just be a simple matter of:

./configure && make && su -c 'make install'

Note that by default, this will install into /usr/local/* -- if "/usr/local/bin" is not in your $PATH, before "/usr/bin" and you still have the old quota-tools installed, this will conflict. If, however, /usr/local/bin is listed before /usr/bin in your $PATH then this should not be a problem. But you should make sure you remove the old quota-tools, regardless.

[John] That's the way I usually do it, too. But there is also something to be said for staying within the boundaries of the package management system, which in SuSE's case (as well as Red Hat and Mandrake, and probably a few others) is the rpm system.

[Thomas] I disagree. Package management should be sufficiently advanced that if one doesn't want a particular package (or one wants to override it), then one can. This is where stow shines, for all the reasons outlined above. You are not tied down to having to install .rpm just because you can.

Of course, if you are compiling from source, for the odd program then this is not so much an issue as all of the libaries are linked (or should be) for the appropriate versions that exist on the system at the time.

[John] Note: with such an old version of the distro as in the case of the querent, dealing with this issue may prove to be more trouble than it's worth, depending on how the package in question has evolved. I.E., in cases where there have been significant changes to the number of files involved, and / or their placement in the filesystem, then the process would likely involve fundamental changes to the rpm spec file, which may require a good understanding of the inner workings of the rpm system.

But for a more current version of an rpm based distro, the process would be much less problematic, and provide the advantage of keeping the rpm database "in sync" with the installed system, thus easing efforts concerning system maintenance regarding package management issues. It would entail something along the lines of replacing the 'make install' with 'rpmbuild --rebuild', after replacing the older package source files with those of the newer version.

What is pop3/smtp of yahoo mail?

[Thomas] There isn't any freely available as yahoo removed that service. That said, you can "emulate" it using a program called 'yahoopops' available here:

https://yahoopops.sourceforge.net

I have install in as default configure (usr/local/) and now I want to reinstall it in /usr/local/quota312 folder. How to uninstall it?

[Thomas] Uninstalling compiled software can be hit and miss, since it depends whether the source makefile has an "uninstall" target in it, or not. So the first thing I would do, is for the source where you compiled your quota-tools, do:

cd /tmp/quota-tools/ && su -c 'make uninstall'

If that doesn't work, then the makefile probably doesn't support the feature, although it is worth looking at the makefile to see. The other option, if not, is to delete the files by hand. There are various tar and rm incantations to do that. But I would do it by hand, myself.

One other thing I will mention to you for the future is that if you find yourself compiling software from source a lot, I really do recommend you use stow [1,2]. It is a really useful piece of software and would have helped you here easily.

[1] https://linuxgazette.net/issue75/peda.html

[2] https://www.hantslug.org.uk/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?LinuxHints/KeepingTrack

Thanks for your quick response. I try your uninstall connand but not success. I got the warning: "make: *** No rule to make target `uninstall'. Stop" I will delete it manually. Can we just install again without uninstall first?

[Ben] There's a way to do it that I invented in a fit of desperation; it's a little manual but quite effective.

1. Run "make -n install > uninstall".
2. Edit the newly-created "uninstall" file and replace the "install" or "cp" commands with "rm", editing each line as necessary.
3. Run "sh uninstall".

---

This page edited and maintained by the Editors of Linux Gazette
HTML script maintained by Heather Stern of Starshine Technical Services, https://www.starshine.org/

---