Mostly Harmless

While trying to enable web based admin gui for our sun ray server, I discovered that, httpd on RHEL 3 has some problems with libraries.

[root@manhattan root]# httpd
httpd: relocation error: /usr/lib/libaprutil-0.so.0: undefined symbol: gdbm_errno

Since I had not installed or changed anything after installing RedHat Enterprise Linux AS 3, I believe, this bug comes packaged with the distribution. And I expect Red Hat to test their software more carefully, at least httpd.

To debug, I checked dependencies for libaprutil-0.so.0 and symbols in libgdbm.so. To my surprise, gdbm_errno was in the libgdbm.so, and httpd should not have reported error. Everything (LD_LIBRARY_PATH and ld.so.cache) was fine.

[root@manhattan root]# rpm -aq | grep httpd
httpd-2.0.46-54.ent
redhat-config-httpd-1.1.0-4.30.2

[root@manhattan root]# rpm -aq | grep gdbm
gdbm-devel-1.8.0-20
gdbm-1.8.0-20

[root@manhattan root]# ldd -d /usr/lib/libaprutil-0.so.0
        libpthread.so.0 => /lib/tls/libpthread.so.0 (0x00cc8000)
        libc.so.6 => /lib/tls/libc.so.6 (0x008c2000)
        /lib/ld-linux.so.2 => /lib/ld-linux.so.2 (0x00216000)
undefined symbol: gdbm_errno    (/usr/lib/libaprutil-0.so.0)
undefined symbol: apr_pool_cleanup_null (/usr/lib/libaprutil-0.so.0)

[root@manhattan root]# nm --dynamic /usr/lib/libgdbm.so | grep gdbm_errno
000061c4 D gdbm_errno

After trying out many things and googling, I was able to fix the problem. Before starting httpd, I had to run

[root@manhattan root]# export LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/libgdbm.so.2

I am not sure why and how it worked and why exactly was their a problem in the first place. This will probably remain a mystery for me.

# posted by nileshbansal @ 3:51 pm - -   -bookmark at -del.icio.us   -