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

[mouss]

Blake Carver wrote:
> Thanks Rod,
> 
> So I guess my big question here is, how do I upgrade this sucker?
> I'd love to just use an RPM, but if this was originally installed via
> source will I mess it up?
> When I do rpm -qa | grep dovecot I get dovecot-1.0-1.2.rc15.el5
> BUT
> dovecot --version shows me a different #
> 
> On Tue, Aug 19, 2008 at 5:15 PM, Roderick A. Anderson <raanders at acm.org> wrote:
>> Unless, like he said above it may have been installed via a tarball.
>>  dovecot --version
>> You should and see if there is more than one installed and
> 
> So --version shows just one version, 1.0.3 (pretty damn old)
> 
>> So try a 'which dovecot' to see if you have more than one installed. And if
>> there is more than one look in /etc/init.d (for SysV-type systems - YMMV)
>> for a dovecot file and see which one it is calling.
> 
>  'which dovecot' just gives me /usr/local/sbin/dovecot
> 
> Taking a look at /etc/init.d/dovecot shows me it's staring Dovecot
> using /usr/local/sbin/dovecot
> and
> ps auxw | grep dovecot does show that's the one that's running
> /usr/local/sbin/dovecot

so you're somewhat lucky: the software was installed (probably from 
source) in a well known place (/usr/local). you can remove this by 
looking at all dovecot and postfix files under /usr/local/. you can do 
the same for other software. yum and rpm don't install software in 
/usr/local/. you'll have to remove startup scripts as well.

once you've removed all the "old" stuff, you can install new packages 
(if you have a development env somewhere, you can build recent SRPMs 
instead of using the old available ones).