[OpenAFS] Trouble Installing OpenAFS 1.2.1 Under RH 2.4.3-12

[Computers in Medicine]

We were running OpenAFS 1.1.1 installed from RPMs under Red Hat Linux 7.1
with kernel 2.4.3-12 with no problems.  Then I was trying to figure out why
httpd wasn't starting up when it was supposed to. chkconfig --list httpd
showed it was supposed to be starting but /etc/rc.d/init.d/httpd didn't seem
to be getting executed on startup.  I could manually run the startup script
and httpd started with no problems.  So I read about the System V startup
sequence and decided to try switching run levels using init so I tried "init
1" which was a bad idea because I was doing this remotely and all networking
went down!

So after kicking myself I went to the physical location of the box and I
thought all I'd have to do was type restart -r 0 however when I did that I
got some errors saying that umount2 could not unmount /usr.  When I started
back up I got some errors saying that there were 35 non-empty files in the
AFS cache (or something similar to that) and then on shutdown I got the same
error about umount2 being unable to unmount /usr.  On the next startup I did
/etc/rc.d/init.d/afs stop and chkconfig afs off and also deleted the AFS
cache and then was able to shut down and start up without errors.  However,
and time I tried to shut down with AFS running I got the error saying that
umount2 could not unmount /usr.

So I decided maybe I should take the opportunity to upgrade to OpenAFS 1.2.1
since maybe it was a bug that had been fixed.  I downloaded the OpenAFS RPMs
on October 14, 2001 and tried to install them and they seemed to install
fine.  I can't remember exactly what happened when I started OpenAFS
manually and I didn't test if AFS itself was working, however when I tried
to stop AFS I got an error saying that /afs could not be found (it wasn't
there) and then the whole machine would freeze.  Nothing would being it back
except for a power cycle and then the while file system would have to be
checked for errors.  In other words, bringing up AFS with this problem not
fixed meant that the machine would freeze when AFS was stopped, either
manually or on shutdown, requiring a power cycle and full disk check to
resume.

I wasn't sure why this was and I was afraid that very many test cycles would
corrupt my file system and get me in a worse mess, so I tried to uninstall
the OpenAFS RPMs with the intention of then reinstalling OpenAFS 1.1.1 from
RPMs. I did this with rpm -e but I got errors when trying to uninstall some
of the RPMS. For example

error: execution of %preun scriptlet from openafs-1.2.1-24.7.1.1 failed,
exit status 1

So, at that point I had OpenAFS 1.1.1 and OpenAFS 1.2.1 installed from RPMs
and partially uninstalled.

I then decided maybe I'd have better luck building OpenAFS from source, and
maybe that build would fix the mess from trying to install and uninstall
RPMs on top of each other.  I downloaded the OpenAFS 1.2.1 source and after
unpacking it I did the following:

./configure --with-afs-sysname=i386_linux24 --with-linux=kernel-headers=/usr
/src/linux-2.4.3 --enable-transarc-paths

make

make dest

This all seemed to go through without errors, but when I tried
/etc/rc.d/init.d/afs start I got an error saying that libafs-2.4.3112.o was
missing from where /usr/vice/etc/modload/ and the only contents of that
directory is a file called libafs.map

So my question now is what's the easiest way to clean up this mess and get
the latest stable version of OpenAFS running?  First I'd like to remove all
the files installed by the RPMs from my hard drive and remove the RPMs from
the database.  Next I'd like to install OpenAFS 1.2.1 if possible, from
source or RPMs.  I could just reformat this machine and start over with
OpenAFS 1.1.1 which I know works, but in a few months I expect this machine
to be in use as a server and then it won't be so easy to reformat it if
there's a problem.  I'd like to figure out how to solve this the easy way
both to save myself time now and to save a lot of time if something like
this happens again.  Thanks for any suggestions anyone can provide.