Upgrading from SLES 9 gives error while loading shared libraries

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Environment

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11

Situation

When you finish the upgrade process from SLES 9 to a new version (i.e. SLES 10) you get some errors about shared libraries after logging into the upgraded system. The following is an example of what happening as soon as you login, but errors could occurs also on different libraries while executing other commands:

dircolors: error while loading shared libraries: libc.so.6: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
/bin/bash: error while loading shared libraries: libdl.so.2: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

You are not able to run most of the commands, therefore the system is completely unmanageable.

Resolution

This could happen because of the variable LD_ASSUME_KERNEL is set.

First of all, you need to unset it in order to have access to the system for that shell. Overwrite the LD_ASSUME_KERNEL variable setting with command:

export LD_ASSUME_KERNEL=

Then, you need to persistent remove that variable from the file which exports it. Open the file where you specified it and delete the line containing the export of the variable LD_ASSUME_KERNEL=*

If you don't know which file sets the variable a good place to start is the /etc/profile.local

Other files which could contain the variable are indicated in the bash man pages.

If you do not know where it was set you might search for it grepping recursive into the /etc and /home directory with the following command:

# grep -r LD_ASSUME_KERNEL /etc /home

Additional Information

The variable LD_ASSUME_KERNEL was used in in the past to enforce LinuxThreads support, which was dropped since SLES 10. If you set it in SLES 10, everything breaks because ld.so looks for glibc and related tools in a path that does not exist.

Disclaimer

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