My friends rents a dedi box from a company in the Netherlands. He upgraded his os to the latest kernel that was available on yum at that time: 2.6.5-1.358. His server went down for a reboot and we got it back online almost 2 weeks later (Yay company take-overs!).

Problem now is that tar is not working, rpm is not working, I did not go any further yet but I expect more to be broken! Is this a common problem or did he do something horribly wrong? Whatever happened, I would like this machine to function properly, could anyone push me in the right direction?

Thanks,

Sounds familiar...upgraded my kernel and my k3b messed up. Your problem however sounds like it's the path that's been messed up. The reason you're probably only nocticing it with tar and rpm is because those are probably the most commonly issued commands from the command line on a system running a gui. Try issuing the full path of the command eg.

/bin/tar -vxf ***.tar

it may be slighlty different on your system, i.e. your tar executable file may be located in /usr/sbin/tar or somewhere similar. But you can find it's location simply by doing :

whereis tar

Same for rpm issue the full path and see if it works then. I used to know how to restore the path but it's long time left my mind. I'll look through my archives.

Kinus

Well, I did a yum update and imported a GPG key and it suddenly worked, tada!