Glibc
 

Hey guys, I am in a MAJOR problem. On my colocated box I was upgrading the glibc and I uninstalled the glibc rpm, then I was going to reinstall the newer rpm, and none of my commands work now! What did I just do guys? Anyway to get glibc back on my machine? Its going to cost me a fourtune for the guy who did the colocation to do the job.

You just learned a valuble lesson. Just about every program on your system links against glibc. Without having a glibc on your machine you can only use programs that were statically linked when they were built (rare these days for people to use static linking), which often means your probably stuck having to boot off a boot CD to repair your system.

For future reference... there is an upgrade flag for RPM.

This is a nightmare, its going to cost me 150 an hour to get glibc put back on.

Why is that? It's like a ten minute task. Maybe twenty minutes if you're not sure what you're doing. Can't you do it yourself?

Some colos that rent servers don't allow physical access, but require their network staff to do everything (this is generally when you rent the hardware from the colo itself). I'm not sure if this is the OP's situation, but it's a possibility.

It's possible you can have your colo staff boot into a rescue image from which you can upload a statically-linked RPM and other binaries, which may be cheaper than having them do a full recovery. You might inquire about that. Otherwise, I have to agree with jtshaw -- Linux is not terribly forgiving, particularly when you're messing around as root. It is theoretically possiblt to upgrade glibc to a new version (not just a patch) safely (a friend of mine has done it), but the one time I tried, I managed to bork the system real good, so I can feel your pain (although I was able to get on console, it was just a hassle).