Hi Folks,
I've been having persistent problems with YUM package updates on one of
our servers. It's not been retrieving updates for several weeks, and I
become concerned about the security implications. I have found the
solution to the problem this morning.
Basically, YUM would crash immediately after invocation, regardless of
the arguments supplied:
[root@perky matt]# yum update
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/usr/share/yum/yummain.py", line 23, in ?
import yum
File "/usr/lib/python2.3/site-packages/yum/__init__.py", line 26, in ?
import depsolve
File "/usr/lib/python2.3/site-packages/yum/depsolve.py", line 29, in ?
from repomd.packageSack import ListPackageSack
File "/usr/lib/python2.3/site-packages/repomd/packageSack.py", line
17, in ?
import libxml2
File "/usr/lib/python2.3/site-packages/libxml2.py", line 1, in ?
import libxml2mod
ImportError: /usr/lib/python2.3/site-packages/libxml2mod.so: undefined
symbol: xmlByteConsumed
I do some digging on Google and find other users with the same error,
but no solution. I post to the Fedora-users list, but do not receive a
reply. Having not had time to investigate for a while, I return to the
problem this morning. I find the following post through Google:
http://www.fedoraforum.org/forum/archive/index.php/t-21359.html
The final entry in the thread suggests checking for duplicate libxml2
libraries. Seems like good advice:
[root@perky src]# locate libxml2.so
/usr/lib/libxml2.so
/usr/lib/libxml2.so.2
/usr/lib/libxml2.so.2.6.8
/usr/local/opt/brightmail/lib/libxml2.so
/usr/local/opt/brightmail/lib/libxml2.so.2
It looks like Brightmail Anti-spam has installed it's own copy of
libxml2, which is probably why things have stopped working. This may
seem like a trivial problem, but this will be difficult for some users
to find and fix. An entry in the FAQ could potentially save users a lot
of digging in search of this relatively simple solution!
Regards,
- Matt
