[Dovecot] How Can I Tell How Dovecot Was Installed?

[Kenneth Porter]

--On Tuesday, August 19, 2008 1:22 PM -0400 Blake Carver 
<lists at lisnews.com> wrote:

> They say that they're not sure if it was installed Via an RPM or a
> source tarball. Dovecot is use MySQL.
>
> This is a RHEL5 server. There are RPMs listed as installed (rpm -qa)
> but I don't know how I can tell what was used to install the currently
> used set up. (also asking on the Postifix list)
>
> Is there something in a conf file or something that shows me how it
> was installed?

RPM is a database of installed files and their checksums. The RPM commands 
unpack files and update the database, or remove files and update the 
database. The best you can do here is to query the database to see if the 
files it knows about match those on the disk. For that, use "rpm -V -v 
dovecot". That does a verbose verify and tells you what files it knows 
about have been changed in some way.

I recommend periodically running "rpm -Va" and dumping the result to a 
file. This will reflect the current state of the system. (You should expect 
that configuration files will show up in this report as modified.) Then 
create a cron job that performs the same command and diffs the result 
against your snapshot. This will alert you of any unexpected changes.