DPKG/apt-get broken - GLIBC_2.6 not found (required by dpkg)
 

Hi all,

Been upgrading a local server which was running Debian 3 (kernel 2.4), got it all the way to 6 (kernel 2.6) successfully, upon updating 6, I had a bunch of:

'package uses Breaks; not supported by dpkg' errors, after googling, I found I needed to update dpkg.

Updated dpkg, now apt-get and dpkg are broken and I'm receiving these errors:

dpkg: /lib/tls/libc.so.6: version 'GLIBC_2.6' not found (required by dpkg) - I'm assuming because the C libraries I have are now out of date.

I'm a pretty techy person but I'm now stuck, I've tried all sorts from trying dist-upgrade to forcing upgrade with -f.

I have backups of the whole machine but I'd really rather not go down that route if possible.

Any help would be very, very much appreciated. Should I now manually try and update libc?

Hello,

I would try downloading the package directly and the associated dependencies and see how much that would help. Here is the link - http://packages.debian.org/squeeze/libs/libc6.1
Let me/us know if that works or not, and we can go from there.

Cheers,

Josh

Thank you very much for your reply.

I've downloaded glibc libraries and dpkg, trouble is, I can't install them, if I try and use dpkg, I get 'GLIBC_2.6' not found (required by dpkg)

I also tried using 'ar vx file.deb' but also to no avail, returned errors:
version 'GLIBC_2.11' not found (required by ar)
version 'GLIBC_2.7' not found (required by /usr/lib/libbfd-2.20.1-system.20100303.so

Seems my glibc libraries are very out of date :(

Hello,

How have you done your migrations? Using package manager, changing sources.list every time and running the following between major migrations?
Or did you upgrade packages separately pointing to the repositories, without upgrading apt, dpkg and apt-get?

Kind regards,

Eric

Hi,

I've changed sources.list everytime then apt-get update, apt-get install, apt-get dist-upgrade, then once the distribution was upgraded, I ran update and install again until dpkg was installed (can't remember which version of Debian it came with).

After dpkg was installed, I used dpkg until version 6 in which I received errors about packages using Break;

I've downloaded libc from debian repository, I've managed to unpack them to /tmp/dpkg using dpkg-deb. Now making backups of my /etc, /lib and /usr directories before copying the files across.

Is this a really bad idea? lol

Hi,

I know you're kidding! A backup is ALWAYS a good idea and most of the time it's just ignored until catastrophic things occur.

Kind regards,

Eric

I already have a backup of the whole machine before I started doing the dist upgrades but they're for disaster recovery, now just making local backups of these directories for quick recovery!

Thanks very much guys for all your help. I'll keep this thread updated in case anybody else does stupid things like me and comes across this thread! Note to self: never manually update dpkg/apt-get lol

Sorry I got in this conversation so late... I was leaving work shortly after I made my first post, and had to drive home. Now I have a few hours to myself before I start another 12 hour shift :p

Thanks for your reply.

I was working on fixing the machine all day yesterday! I updated the libc libraries in which it broke the whole of linux, SSH gave me nothing but 'FATAL: Kernel too old' messages and webmin was giving perl errors.

I booted a few linux live CDs such as knoppix and found the only one to work was my recently downloaded CentOS server disk as that supported RAID, upon trying to restore my /etc, /usr and /lib folders, there isn't enough space on the partition! the /usr folder has gone from around 500MB to 1.5GB?? I've no idea how or why, but I'm now resizing the partitions using a GParted boot disc.

Left it going overnight and GParted failed to complete all operations so I'm now trying again! Seems whatever I try, I'm running into brick walls lol maybe now is the time to reinstall the OS and start again!

Since you got errors saying that your kernel is too old, have you checked your kernel version and upgraded it accordingly, if so?

Hi,

If it's that broken I think that your best option is to perform a clean installation of Debian 6 and restore your documents. I think you'll save a lot of time in doing that.

Kind regards,

Eric

That was my first thought too, trouble is, how do you upgrade your kernel when everything is broken? Couldn't SSH anything and webmin was completely broken - literally, the machine became inaccessible.

If my second attempt at GParted fails, I'm going to start over with CentOS, I personally prefer CentOS over Debian and have much more experience with CentOS.

I know this isn't Debian's fault at all, it's all mine!!

Hi,

Simplified answer: You can upgrade your kernel if you first resolve all your other problems and dependency issues. That's why I advised you to perform a clean install. Resolving all your errors manually will take you a lot more time to solve and give you a lot of headaches.

Kind regards,

Eric

Hi Guys,

Was going to install CentOS but required around 5 or 6 CDs which meant downloading them first, I'm an impatient guy and had an Ubuntu 11.04 Server edition CD so installed that!

I've also installed Gnome as I'm the only techy guy here, if something goes wrong and I'm not here, it would be nice if someone else in the office could at least have a bash at fixing it instead of me having to come in.

Thanks for all your help guys! Now running back to normal, I'm already sick of typing 'sudo' lol

Loving Linux though :)