Tech Journal: The side effects of removing libc-dummy-centos-4

[Alystair]

Now that we are on the new system, I was curious as to the hazards of removing the libc-dummy-centos-4 that disallows you to run "yum update" amongst other things. Our site doesn't need cpanel/plesk/etc so we went ahead and messed around a bit.

The first thing we noticed after removing the evil package and running yum was that as soon as we restarted, the w/who commands stopped functioning. We quickly restored the system to the way it was before using the backup system in VZPP. Next thing we tried was excluding the ProcPS package from Yum to see if it was the update to w/who itself or a dependant package. That also didn't work.

We flipped our idea around and tried updating one package at a time, glibc updated with no issue as did procps, yum and others. It finally came up that OpenSSH was causing this. We ran yum and excluded OpenSSH, seems to be working fine. We are still trying to find out the reasons behind this.

If anyone else wants to chime in please do so. I hope I didn't make Andre and the other techs angry by doing this

[Alystair]

Please note, again, if you are trying to run Cpanel/Plesk/etc this is not a recommended modification to the system!

[Milovan]

Hey there, Sherlock

CentOS, and any other VPS OS template has certain packages already included. You would also see a httpd template, and its dependencies have these .swsoft-like endings. I would, however, advise you not to remove these and install regular packages, because using Virtuozzo templates memory consumption of the VPS is decreased.