ruhroh

[Charles Steinkuehler]

Matt Luettgen wrote:
> I've installed qmail from source and am wanting to try other distro's,
> but I cant seem to 'make uninstall it'  its been suggested that I rm -rf
> /var/qmail and rm -rf `which sendmail` but when I asked how much pain I
> would go through to recover from it I was told it would be quite
> painful.  Any advice on this small, yet painful mistake?

Looks like you've gotten a lot of advice, but not particularly anything 
useful for qmail.

As I'm sure you've found out, DJB's build/install process does *NOT* use 
the gnu automake tools, and has no mechanism for uninstalling qmail once 
you've installed it.

The good news, is there isn't really much required to uninstall qmail, 
and it's basically a reversal of the manual steps you performed when 
installing.  Note also that qmail can happily live with sendmail (or 
other MTAs) installed on the same system, and you can fairly easily 
switch between them via init scripts or other mechanisms.

To uninstall qmail, you simply need to:

- switch back to running sendmail (or your previous MTA) in your init 
scripts

- make sure any mail is delivered from the qmail queues

- stop the currently running qmail process(es)

- remove the /var/qmail directory

- remove the various qmail users/groups you created before compiling qmail

- replace the qmail version of sendmail (a wrapper to inject messages 
into the qmail queue) with the original sendmail.

Of course, it could be more complicated than this if you have a large 
userbase, converted all your local mailboxes over to maildir format (and 
don't want to keep them that way), but if you were just playing with 
qmail, you shouldn't really have much problem uninstalling.  If you run 
into a particular issue, post details and we'll try to help you out.

Really all you *HAVE* to do is prevent qmail from starting up at boot 
time, and re-configure your previous MTA to run instead.

-- 
Charles Steinkuehler
charles at steinkuehler.net