On 6/1/2011 7:22 AM, Pat Traynor wrote: > Here's my situation: I lease a host from a provider. They initially > did all my setup, and I do the simple maintenance I need. A short time > ago, the spam increased dramatically. Others on this list reported it, > and a common suggested problem was that the installed Spamassassin was > badly out of date. Mine is 3.0.4, and I probably fall into that > category. > > I called my co-hosting provider and asked to have Spamassassin upgraded. > They told me that to do this would require an upgrade to my Fedora core, > which would require an upgrade to this, and to that, and I'd then need > to reinstall those... Bottom line is that the whole ordeal will cost > me thousands of dollars, which I simply don't have. My gut feeling is > that a SA upgrade *could* be done, but they see an opportunity to get > some cash out of me, and they know they've got me by the short hairs.
Sounds like they're looking for money. SA is dependent on Perl and a bunch of modules, but if you are already at 5.12 as you mentioned in a later post, there should be nothing stopping you from upgrading SA. This upgrade should take a couple of hours at most. This is definitely not something that should cost thousands of dollars and require you to upgrade everything. > I do a lot of my own installations without any problem, but the thing is > that I've got a couple dozen customers using Spamassassin, and if I > crash and burn on the upgrade, it won't be a pretty situation. So... > > I was wondering if it's possible to install an alternate version of > Spamassassin and verify that it's working properly before burning my > bridge on the outdated (but working) version I've currently got > installed. That could be a bit tricky. You would have to upgrade the required Perl modules first (which *shouldn't* cause a problem with the old SA version). Then you could install the new SA in your local directory and call it directly from there with some test mail files to verify that it is working. However, you would probably then want to re-install it into the system directories to be used by the server. In-place upgrades have never been a problem for me. I generally install the new version while the old version is still up and running. Then I just restart spamd to activate the new stuff. Since spamd reads everything into memory when it starts, it doesn't really matter that the files are changing while it is running. Sure, it is possible for this to cause problems, but I've been doing it for years now with no issues. That being said, I've been following the current versions pretty closely and have never tried to jump as far as 3.0.4 to 3.3.1. There may be some incompatibilities with the Bayes DB format and there may also be some changes in the configuration keywords, but your testing should be able to catch those easily enough before you try to go live. Try to install it the same way it was installed originally (rpm, CPAN, source?) to cut down on the problems with having different versions installed in different places. -- Bowie
