Reclaim was not 'safe'

[Gerben Wierda]

Naively assuming the logic of ‘port reclaim’ would be safe I ran this on my production installation of nameserver/webserver/mailserver

The result was catastrophic. After removing stuff it told me it needed to rebuild dovecot and after that most of my setup was gone. rspamd had been removed, redis had been removed, dcc had been removed, clamav, etc. In other words: reclaim says it only removes inactive ports, but when I ran it it completely hosed the set of active ports. tcl was haning on trying to start dovecot. A complete meltdown.

My guess afterwards is that at one time, years ago, I had installed mail-server, but I stopped using that collection at that time pretty much immediately as it also installed stuff that had nothing to do with a mail server, such as openldap (which I did not need) or BIND (where I use unbound/nsd). So a reclaim, done years later, noticed that e.g. rspamd had been installed as a sub of mail-server, mail-server was uninstalled (but aparently at that time the rest had remained or had been reinstalled separately), so it concluded it should remove the dependents, including those that were active. I am uncertain if this is true. I have been working all afternoon (backup software giving me problems) to restore my setup. It is now running again, so I can finally contact this mailing list again ;-)

Anyway, the hard lesson was: reclaim is not ’safe’. I  thought, reclaim would only remove inactive installs, but it removed active ones as well.

It is not possible for me to retrace what went wrong exactly, sadly.

Gerben Wierda (LinkedIn <https://www.linkedin.com/in/gerbenwierda>)
R&A Enterprise Architecture <https://ea.rna.nl/> (main site)
Book: Chess and the Art of Enterprise Architecture <https://ea.rna.nl/the-book/>
Book: Mastering ArchiMate <https://ea.rna.nl/the-book-edition-iii/>

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