things not to do...

[Kyle Burton <mortis@voicenet.com>]

Last night, I decided it would be a good idea to put rh6.0 on my laptop.

I installed it, leaving my old home partition as it was, and mounted it
after the install was finished. 

Everything was good.  Then I tried to run StarOffice.  This failed.  I
figured it was a problem with SO -- I had previously installed it onto
a partition that got blown away by the install.  No biggie, I'll just
re-install it.

Oops, the version of glibc is wrong.  Ok, SO comes with the (now) older 
versions of glibc so you can put them in the SO install directory.  Only
problem is that you have to override the default shared lib loader
/lib/ld-linux.so with the one they provide --- now they warn you that
this is dangerous, becaues newer programs/libs may have trouble with an older
dynamic loader thingy.  Ok, I figure I'll try the new one out, and if 
everything seems ok, I'll leave it, if not, I'll switch it back.

(here comes the part about what not to do :)

I cd'd into /lib, and executed the following command:

[root@warhammer /lib]# mv ld-linux.so.2 dist.ld-linux.so.2

No, if you can guess, that little symlink is needed by _every_ binary
on the system that uses the shared version of libc.  So, the next time
I tried to run ls...can you geuss what happened?  BZZT!  You LOSE!
Nothing worked from there on out -- I couldn't rum echo, X crashed,
I couldn't log in, I couldn't even run shutdown!

Don't do it.  Ever.

I fixed it by booting off the install cdrom, mounting my root directory,
and renaming the file, so you can recover from it -- of course I had
to wait for fsck to finish, and it nixed a few inodes in the process,
but everything turned out ok.

Moral of this story?  Don't let kyle fuxor with your equipment.  Or was it
know what you're doing before you do it?  Or, a little knowledge is 
dangerous?


blah
k

------------------------------------------------------------------------------
All parts should go together without forcing. You must remember that the parts
you are reassembling were disassembled by you. Therefore, if you can't get
them together again, there must be a reason. By all means, do not use a
hammer. 
    -- IBM maintenance manual, 1925
mortis@voicenet.com                            http://www.voicenet.com/~mortis
------------------------------------------------------------------------------



update: Wed May 19 10:17:38 EDT 1999

I researched this on dejanews -- aparrently the rh boxed set ships with 
a version of SO that works, SO doesn't yet offerr this on their web site.
I read that it's caused by the fact that SO used undocumented features of
an older glibc...caveat emptor



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