I'm trying to get my Mississippi servers online after the big storm and I've run across a problem getting cups to start. Apparently, we have a printer no one knows anything about attached to a Redhat Linux 7.x server. About half the office is using it. When the server came back up, I got the following error in the syslog:

Starting cupsd: cupsd: error while loading shared libraries: libssl.so.2: cannot load shared object file: No such file or directory

I did a search on the drive to make sure a link didn't get crossed but it was nowhere to be found. I did some looking around and found that I should just install openssl again and it should install the file. I compiled 0.9.8 from source but couldn't get it installed. I went back and got 0.9.7g and installed it then tried to restart cups. Same error. A hard drive search showed the libssl.so.2 file wasn't on the system. I found another article saying that I should try sticking with the rpm designed for the platform. I managed to hunt down openssl-0.9.6-19.i386.rpm and force it to install over itself. Still no libssl.so.2 file. I looked at downloading the glibc package just on the wild chance that it would contain the file in question but a search of the contained files didn't turn it up so I held off.

How can I get this file onto my system? I don't use cups anywhere else in our network so I can't find a file to pull from another server. Is there an option I need to add when compiling the openssl source that triggers this file install that I'm missing? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

I forgot to post my uname -a output, if you want it. Always better to overinform than under, right?

Linux servername 2.4.2-2 #1 Sun Apr 8 20:41:30 EDT 2001 i686 unknown

I managed to figure this one out. It looks like cups requires two files from openssl to operate: libssl.so.2 and libcrypto.so.2. openssl installs two files that combine the functionality of these libraries into single files, called: libcrypto.so.0.9.6 and libssl.so.0.9.6. You just have to create symbolic links to the files in the /usr/bin directory and give the link names the files cups are looking for.

cd /usr/bin
ln -s ./libssl.so.0.9.6 ./libssl.so.2
ln -s ./libcrypto.so.0.9.6 ./libcrypto.so.2

I still don't know how it got scrambled to begin with but here's how you fix it.