[Techtalk] Making room for Oracle

[Malcolm Tredinnick]

On Tue, Nov 26, 2002 at 11:38:44PM +0000, Telsa Gwynne wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 27, 2002 at 09:40:57AM +1100 or thereabouts, Malcolm Tredinnick wrote:
[...]
> > (but please be careful: I explained this to somebody else a while
> > back and they deleted glibc, claiming that they didn't want any
> > GNOME stuff and they got confused between glib and glibc. They had
> > to use hammers to force glibc to be uninstalled, but they got there
> > in the end, much to their subsequent disappointment).
> 
> Ouch.
> 
> I am continually typo'ing one of those when I mean the other.
> But luckily, I check, because I know I am prone to that. I have
> absolutely no idea how I would recover from deleting glibc.
> About the only program I can think of which is -not- linked 
> against it is 'sash': a stand-alone shell which is statically
> linked specifically for those occasions when you manage to 
> delete some vital library. I don't go as far as those people
> who make it the default root shell. But I do always put it
> on the machine. Just in case!

Veering wildly off-topic, but one way to fix this problem on a Red Hat
box would be to boot into 'rescue' mode from the installation CD. Then
make sure the various partitions from the hard drive are mounted
correctly somewhere (rescue mode will mount partitions for you, but it
will not know, for example, that var/ on /dev/hda1 needs to point to
/dev/hda2 if your /var is on another partition. So some manual messing
around is necessary). Then use another secret rpm trick:

	rpm -ivh --root=/mnt/foo glibc-common*

It's amazing the amount of recovery you can do in this vein when you
have really, really messed things up and the lynch mob are getting a
good piece of rope and a tree branch organised.

Malcolm

-- 
Quantum mechanics: the dreams stuff is made of.