a Thanksgiving disaster averted

[Lonni J Friedman]

https://netllama.linux-sxs.org/llamaland/2007/11/kernel-panic.html

I (thought that I) had some time to kill yesterday afternoon, and went
ahead and upgraded from Fedora 7 to Fedora 8 via yum. Everything
appeared to go well, until I rebooted and ended up with a kernel
panic:

/bin/nash: /lib/libc.so.6: version 'GLIBC_2.7' not found (required by
/lib/libcrypto.so.6)

Errr, this was not good to put it mildly. At first I was thinking that
somehow glibc never got updated. I booted off the Fedora 8 DVD into
rescue mode, and chrooted into the filesystem to poke around. Nope,
glibc definitely had been upgraded. So was nash, and so was openssl
(from which libcrypto originates). So, at this point I'm very
confused, and a bit panicked.

One oddity that I did notice was that nash should have been in /sbin
rather than /bin, and then it hit me, this was the initrd that was
broken. But I'm still not sure exactly how or why. I grab the initrd,
and extract its contents:

gunzip < initrd-2.6.23.1-42.fc8.img | cpio -i --make-directories

and start poking around. I confirm that yes, nash is in /bin. I look
at /lib/libc.so.6 and see that its symlinked to a
/lib/i686/nosegneg/libc-2.5.so. Aha! I have no clue where
/lib/i686/nosegneg/libc-2.5.so came from, but then realize that I have
it on the master filesystem too. I'm still not entirely sure why
mkinitrd is using it instead of the libc.so in /lib on the master
filesystem. Anyway, I grab /lib/libc-2.7.so and dump it into
/lib/i686/nosegneg (inside the initrd filesystem), and fix the symlink
to point to it instead of libc-2.5.so. While doing this, I noticed
that libm.so.6 is also pointing to an older GLIBC_2.5 version, so I
fix it in the same fashion. I then repackaged the initrd:

find . | cpio -H newc -o > ../initrd.cpio
gzip -9 ../initrd.cpio

And reboot. Bingo, no more problems. At this point, I fixed all the
same files under /lib/i686/nosegneg on the master filesystem so that
future generated initrds wouldn't be similarly broken. What I still
don't understand is why this got broken originally, or what this stuff
inside of /lib/i686/nosegneg actually is. None of it appears to be
part of an RPM.

-- 
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L. Friedman                                    netllama at gmail.com
LlamaLand                       https://netllama.linux-sxs.org