[Techtalk] openssh/glibc installation problems on RH6.2

[Raven, corporate courtesan]

Heya --

Quoth wildgrass (Fri, Nov 02, 2001 at 02:16:48PM -0800):
> I was trying to install the openssh and openssh-server  rpms on a
> RH6.2 machine which currently has glibc-2.1.3-15,
> and got the following dependency errors :

	Argh, dependency hell!  My least favorite part of upgrading.  I
had this same issue with a Red Hat 6.2 box that I used to admin.  If I
remember correctly, it's very difficult to upgrade glibc with rpm,
because any packages (sometimes including rpm itself) that depend upon
the old library (which is pretty much everything) won't work once you've
installed the new library.  This is made worse by the fact that packages
that break after a glibc upgrade often include things like ls, cd, and
other really common and necessary things.
 
> [root at nml i386]# rpm -ivh openssh*
> error: failed dependencies:
>          libc.so.6(GLIBC_2.2)   is needed by openssh-2.9p2-8.7
> 
>  From what I can tell, it requires GLIBC 2.2 to work.

	At least this rpm does.  If you compile openssh from source, it
will work quite happily with the older version of the library, as long
as you have the proper crypto libraries installed.  This will make your
rpm database somewhat out of date, but it's what I ended up doing.
 
> [root at nml i386]# rpm -ivh glibc*
> error: failed dependencies:
>          glibc >= 2.1.92 conflicts with rpm-4.0.2-6x
> 
> It seems from the redhat site that the 2 available versions of openssh
> requires glibc2.2. So, I am stuck.

	I think you basically have two choices here.  Compile from
source and forget about the rpm database, or upgrade entirely to a more
recent Red Hat version.  (If someone else has better programmer voodoo,
please let me know.)
 
> I cannot find anything on redhat.com or through google search on how
> to get unstuck. It seems to me that RH6.2 cannot work with glibc2.2.
 
	It probably can, with a lot of hand tweaking.  I haven't the
patience most of the time.  Is this a production system, or a home box?
Do you have good backups?  If not, do that first.  Messing around with
major libraries is a common way to hose a system. 

	I'm in the midst of a similar thing at the moment -- my
Slackware system has an old glibc, and so I'm dithering about whether to
do the upgrades by hand (much. much recompiling since Slack's packaging
system is just .tar.gzs, and it all has to be done in exactly the right
order) or trust to the autoslack distro-upgrade tool, which is
admittedly pretty beta in the latest version.

	This is so much easier on Debian.  (Not to say that anyone
else's choice of distro is bad!  This is just a really annoying process
on most Linuxes, and it's one command-line on Debian.)

Cheers,
Raven

"Oh -- oop, is Raven still here?"
"It's okay -- she's one of the guys.  Come on, she's in a committed
 relationship with a woman.  That's more than you can say for most
 of the rest of us."
  -- Alex, on geek men