help I installed rpm4.0.6 and now nothing works! 68

It sounds reasonably to me, with a few caveats.

First I must emphasize that I might have been wrong thinking that the rpm4 rpm was not for rh6.2. Moe's post indicated that rpm4 for rh6.2 did exist. Given this premise, upgrading rpm4 past the reportedly broken versions sounds perfectly sound to me.

My two major caveats, are that 1) if at all possible talk to the regular admins of the computer, and 2) do some investigation of what actually went wrong. With a small amount of luck, you may find out; not doing so is like walking with the eyes closed. You may think you are on the right path, but why not open the eyes.

The first problem is to get in. If the computer cannot successfully load libc, it's hard to do anything except exploiting already-running programs that do not rely on the "system()" call. Most likely you will have to take out the main disk and mount it on another computer. The other computer needs not run a similar version of Linux, at all.

It is most unfortunate that "chroot" is not a shell built-in, that prevents you from starting a shell on the hosting computer, and and then chroot to the mounted disk within the same shell. As it is, chroot needs to start a shell (or some program) inside the chroot environment.

To work around this, do something like this, on the host, and as root:

This gives you a crude yet powerfull shell, but with no readline support. You can still edit the command line the old way, backspace-deleting back the to error and retyping. You can also write a perl script that defines a few handy functions, then executes the loop above.

But the most interesting is perhaps, with no chroot,

catmnt-the-disk-etc-ld.so.conf

and

ldconfig -p -Cmnt-the-disk-etc-ld.so.cache

and

strace -ftmp-enigma.strace perl -e 'chroot "-mnt-the-disk"; exec "-bin-bash", "-i"'

Then you can analyze the system calls made by the process after the chroot. With suitable arguments to strace, you can have it log more of the contents of the buffers in calls to read() and write().

In the crude perl shell, instead of "ls", you have to do:

print join(" ", glob "*"), "-n"

or

# perl -e 'print join(" ", stat "-tmp-B"), "-n"' 839 1310992 16893 3 501 501 0 4096 1136366376 1136056815 1136343854 4096 16

where the numbers output are

0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 dev ino mode nlink uid gid rdev size atime mtime ctime blksize blocks

and to get the mtime in human-readable form,

print scalar localtime((stat"-lib-libc-2.3.5.so")9), "-n"

(Notice how the parens are placed outside "stat".) In stead of cd

chdir "blah"

and early on

chroot "-mnt-the-disk"

To run static programs, do e.g.

system "-sbin-ldd", "-bin-bash"

perl will run a shell to execute the command, and that does not work.

Notice that ldconfig is not static.

To do installs, you may need the "--root" option to rpm, and run rpm on the host:

rpm --rootmnt-the-disk --force -Uvhoutside-thedisk-blah-1.0-1.0.i386.rpm

-Enrique