My other machine, a 4-year-old Dell of mine, runs OK except that the harddrive has recently begun showing more bad blocks than than a Toronto Argonauts highlight reel. So I went and bought a new drive. I RTFM'd and set the jumper to Master and swapped drives. Then I thought I'd try putting Redhat 9 on the system while I was at it. The install went OK, and the check for bad blocks didn't find anything. I decided to remove Postfix as the mail agent and replace it with ssmtp. Then rpm whined about how mutt depended on Postfix. I did a --nodeps removal of Postfix, and rpm froze. I popped open another tty and killed rpm.

Then I tried rebuilding the rpm database from scratch. Two hours ago, I did "rpm -vv --initdb". The response on the screen was...

D: opening db environment /var/lib/rpm/Packages joinenv D: opening db index /var/lib/rpm/Packages create mode=0x42

Nothing further since then. Is this a long process on a 450 mhz machine, or are things so badly hosed that I should re-install ?

You did rpm --rebuilddb, right? Might be hosed. If you don't have a big investment in the machine already, might be a good time to reinstall. IIRC ssmtp and postfix can live on a system together. Just do postfix stop and start ssmtp. -- Keith Mastin BeechTree Information Technology Services Inc. Toronto, Canada (416)696 6070 -- The Toronto Linux Users Group. Meetings: http://tlug.ss.org TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://tlug.ss.org/subscribe.shtml