mingetty error while loading shared library libc.so.6

Question

I have a 64bit CentOS 5.5 box that I recently upgraded to 5.6. During the upgrade, I removed the unnecessary 32 bit packages (i*86 architecture packages) since they are not really valid for 64 bit machines. As well, I removed some other packages that were only needed for development machines.

Some of the 32 bit packages removed include:

glib2      glibc    libgcc     libstdc++

Some of the 64 bit packages removed include:

boost-devel       cpp                gcc               gcc-c++
gdb               glibc-devel        glibc-headers     libstdc++-devel

The following are some of the packages that remain:

# rpm -qa | grep libc
libcap-1.10-26
glibc-common-2.5-58.el5_6.4
glibc-2.5-58.el5_6.4

However, now I get the following error when I reboot:

/sbin/mingetty: error while loading shared libraries: libc.so.6: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

This log is repeated many times for each terminal, and then INIT pauses for 5 minutes because it is respawning too fast.

As a result, I cannot log into the console, but can still SSH to the box.

I have verified that libc.so.6 is present:

# ls -lrt /lib64/libc[\.-]*
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1716720 Jun 27  2011 /lib64/libc-2.5.so
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root      11 Sep 20 19:16 /lib64/libc.so.6 -> libc-2.5.so

And that mingetty is pointing to it:

ldd /sbin/mingetty 
    linux-vdso.so.1 =>  (0x00007fffb7ffc000)
    libc.so.6 => /lib64/libc.so.6 (0x00002adf73cb2000)
    /lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 (0x00002adf73a94000)

If I perform a fresh install of CentOS 5.6 with these same set of packages, everything works fine, so I suspect that the problem is a result of the removal scripts for some of these packages.

Does anyone know what might be going on?

Answer 1

Turns out that selinux was enabled during the yum update since some of its packages were installed. As a result, it messed up some of the links. The solution was to disable selinux immediately after the yum update.