On Mon, Apr 18, 2011 at 4:16 PM, Tom Sorensen tsorensen@gmail.com wrote:
There is a known issue with one of the security updates on that version of glibc.
That said, it's still *highly* recommended that you update. There are four CVEs closed by this glibc update, one of which is potentially a remote privilege escalation (and that one is NOT the one that is causing the issue).
If, for some reason, you cannot update then you should seriously consider whether or not those systems can connect to the Internet, or if you should get the glibc from Scientific Linux that has the 3 patches that do not cause an issue in the meantime.
For clarification, this bug is only known to be affecting Evolution and Gnome-Panel, correct? If so, for most servers, the update should not be a concern. I've updated four desktops -- the two with Intel video chips are not affected at all. The two with nVidia chipsets and proprietary nVidia drivers *are* affected. Since I don't use Evolution, the "work-around" for me is to issue the "pkill gnome-panel" command. Usually doing this once will fix it, but sometimes it requires a couple shots.
I dual-boot into Linux Mint 10 (so I can remotely support my father who uses Linux Mint -- I need to be able to replicate his errors when he has them). It has a very similar issue, except, in its case, both Nautilus and Gnome-Panel do not come up. I have to go to a tty terminal and issue the "pkill nautilus" and "pkill gnome-panel" commands. I didn't have this problem *until* I updated the video driver to nVidia's proprietary one. So, again, it appears it might have something to do with the nVidia's driver.
At any rate, there are work-arounds -- for those who use Evolution, the SL update is probably the best. I'm kind of surprised that Red Hat has not issued a fix yet.