LinuxQuestions.org - dhclient seg fault; eth0 DEAD. Help!

Kinda nube, kinda not, running Fedora Core 7, the i386 modules on an Athlon 64 box.

This afternoon, my package manager alerted me to some updates, and as is my habit, I went ahead and applied them, and then rebooted as instructed.

When I came up, eth0 failed on bootup. The error message indicated a segmentation fault at line 297 of /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifup-eth, which pointed me to an execution of dhclient, vis:

/sbin/dhclient ${DHCLIENTARGS} ${DEVICE}

Fiddling with the command line, I determined at first that it was upset because the args included a .pid file with an expired PID, so I manually executed the command line without the -pf flag, and eth0 started. Cool.

So then, I modified the ifup-eth script so it wouldn't issue the -pf flag, and restarted the machine.

And now, I can't do ANYTHING to get eth0 up. dhclient seg faults no matter what I do. I even undid all (two of) my changes and tried again. Nothing. Eth0 will not come up. My web site is a boat anchor.

HELP!

Any ideas?

Oh, ps: I do take backups, but only of /var and /etc. So restoring these won't restore /sbin. If the problem is dhclient itself, do I have any recourse other than reinstalling Fedora core 7 from scratch, and then restoring my backup? And once I do that, how do I keep the damned package manager from munging my dhclient again?

Phil W.