portupgrade system destruction?

[Kris Kennaway]

On Mon, Jan 03, 2005 at 09:17:12PM -0600, Eric Anderson wrote:
> I have a few dedicated servers at a hosting company (about 3 hours drive 
> time away).  On one of the systems I ran a 'portupgrade -arR' this 
> morning, and then disconnected (I ran it in a screen session). About an 
> hour later, I realized I could not log in anymore via ssh.  Seems that I 
> can connect, but my passwords fail (permission denied).  I can't FTP in, 
> or check mail with any username/password combos.  Even my preshared SSH 
> keys do not work.  When connecting via POP, I get this message:
> 
> Connected to hostname.
> Escape character is '^]'.
> /usr/libexec/ld-elf.so.1: Shared object "libc-client4.so.8" not found
> Connection closed by foreign host.
> 
> Can anyone help me figure out what may have gone wrong?

Probably you're 1) using an ssh port instead of the base system
version, and 2) the portupgrade stalled or exited somewhere in between
updating a library it depends on and updating the port itself (ditto
for pop).  System upgrades can be dangerous when you don't have a
fallback plan :-)

> And even how I might be able to fix it remotely

If you can't log in to the machine, you're out of luck. 

> or walk someone through a fix?

Depends on exactly what has gone wrong.  You'll need to at least get
someone to tell you what's on the console, if anything.

In future, consider setting up a serial console from another machine
that you can access remotely.  You can repair almost anything this way
without needing physical access to the machine (since you can reboot
and do stuff from single-user mode).

Kris
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