[CentOS] [MASSMAIL] Re: yum update (first in a long time) - /var/log/dovecot no longer used

Fri May 6 16:08:57 UTC 2016
Johnny Hughes <johnny at centos.org>

On 05/06/2016 09:18 AM, Gary Stainburn wrote:
> On Friday 06 May 2016 14:55:33 Valeri Galtsev wrote:
>>
>> Exactly. As I said in the first post (reply to which happened to hijack
>> the thread - my apologies that was not intended by me), it was only
>> intended to help those who are just about to make this step to really
>> think about what it will entail. And thanks everybody who added their
>> comments, they all do the same what I intended.
>>
>> Valeri
>>
> 
> Unfortunately, the problem was that I didn't (know I) have a decision to make 
> regarding systemd or SysV.

You made that decision when you installed CentOS-7 instead of CentOS-6.
 CentOS-7 has always used SystemD .. CentOS-6 has always used SysV.

> 
> My decision was   do I keep my system up to date (which it wasn't) or not.  I 
> am sure that I am no different to 90% of sysadmins who don't read all release 
> notes before every 'yum update' run.

Well, that might be true, but if you are going to do a major update you
should.  Especially an update that crosses 2 point releases.  We do
major release notes for point releases, as does Red Hat.

https://wiki.centos.org/Manuals/ReleaseNotes

(Release Notes, 7.1503 and 7.1511 {current set})

https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en/red-hat-enterprise-linux/

(Release Notes and Technical Notes, 7.1 and 7.2)

I scanned those for dovecot and did not see any known issues.

> 
> I do have to concede that the update did update a great deal of RPM's and 
> probably some by a number of versions.  This no doubt is the reason I now 
> have a reasonable sized number of changes I need to deal with (including 
> keep_environment in EXIM, and journals moving on Dovecot )

As I said before, EXIM is not even part of CentOS. It is part of EPEL.

EPEL is awesome, but it is not part of RHEL proper.  While they make
every effort to make it as stable/tested as they can, if it was
something that they wanted to provide an SLA for in RHEL, it would be
part of RHEL.  Since its not, it (or any other package in EPEL and not
RHEL) should be thought of as part of the base OS (either RHEL or CentOS).

Dovecot was last updated on 25 Nov 2015.  The one before that was, to
the best of my knowledge, 5 July 2014 Which was part of 7.0.1406
release).  It would seem you did almost 2 years worth of updates at one
time.  That is likely not good {how many critical (even named updates,
with their own website) have been done in the last 2 years}. Heartbleed,
Shellshock, Poodle and Ghost come to mind right off the top of my head.
Hopefully 90% of sysadmins don't do that (jump from through 2 point
releases (almost 2 years worth of updates) on a production server
without doing any kind if testing proir to the update.  With 3rd party
repos enabled.

I am sure some sysadmins do that though, you are correct.

As to your actual issue, how dovecot logging was changed, I have no idea
unless it was a system wide change in logging.  To really figure it out,
one would need to perform an analysis of your individual setup.  I also
see no issues for dovecot reported concerning an upgrade from rhel7.0 to
rhel7.2.



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