Solving SpamAssassin ioctl problem

Just a note about SpamAssassin.

SpamAssassin error: Inappropriate ioctl for device

I ran into this problem on a Red Hat box after I installed Red Hat 9 on new hard drives after the old hard drives (which had Red Hat 8 installed) died. I had a backup of the SpamAssassin Bayes database and restored it in the same location on the Red Hat 9 system, but everytime I started the SpamAssassin daemon, I got this error:

This was confusing to me.

I searched all over the Net for a solution, but found none. Finally, I figured it out on my own. :-)

I executed the file command on the backed-up database files and got this:

When I ran the file command on new database files created by SpamAssassin, I got this:

I looked through the SpamAssassin code and discovered that it could use the GDBM_File module and the DB_File module for tie-ing hashes to databases. THe GDBM_File module was installed and the DB_File module was not.

Once I installed the DB_File module, SpamAssassin was able to use the restored databases files just fine.