[CentOS] yum problem with glibc

Tue May 29 10:53:16 UTC 2012
Johnny Hughes <johnny at centos.org>

On 05/27/2012 06:03 AM, Timothy Murphy wrote:
> John Stanley wrote:
>
>>>>> Now this is my last question:
>>>>> Can I be reasonably (say 90%) sure that the above command
>>>>> will not stop the server running?
>>> The command in question was: rpm -Uvh --force *.rpm
>>> where the RPMs were glibc and glibc-common.
>>>
>>>> No you can NOT and don't ever assume that.
>>>> That's a mistake thinking that.
> I wasn't assuming anything.
> I was asking for an estimate of the probability that the command will fail.
> In every such situation there is a certain probability p of success,
> and a probability 1-p of failure.
>
> Johnny Hughes suggested the command, so on that basis alone
> I would give it a high probability of success.

If you have ALL the latest glibc/nscd files to replace all the installed
RPMS in the same place, and if you upgrade them all at the same time
(including any i686 ones that you have installed).. then it SHOULD work
properly and not break.  I would say that the probability of success is
close to 100% ... IF you have the proper files in the directory when you
do the force install.

Let me be clear again ... you want one (and only ONE) RPM file for each
glibc-* and nscd-* rpm that you have installed on your machine in a
directory (if you have i686 RPMS installed, one i686 rpm for each RPM). 
You want all the name-version-release strings to be the same for the
files in this directory ... and for them to be the latest version that
is available.

However, I do want to point out that glibc is the main C library and it
is very critical to all operations (It is easily the most important
package set installed on your machine .. nothing works if it breaks in
the wrong way).  Also I would point out that it assumes everything else
is installed and working properly.

Whenever you run extremely important commands (like "yum update" or "rpm
-Uvh --force") you need to be running these from inside a "screen"
session.  This will prevent a connectivity issue and subsequent
disconnect from killing all running processes in your current shell.

<snip>

I would be happy to have you contact me off list and have you provide me
a temporary login to your machine with the proper access and analyze
your machine and do this for you.  I would charge you my standard
consulting rate to do this.  If you are interested, then contact me off
list at johnny at centos.org.

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