On Thu, Apr 07, 2011 at 04:56:11PM +0200, Haendel Kristina wrote:
> our automatic nightly yum update has loaded glibc 2.5-58.
> Since this morning, some users on some machines sometimes (I can't say 
> It more clear) have no gnome panel.

The following is not a proper repair, but after some hours of 
trying a few things, I am back to a working panel and desktop.

The problem appears to be the improperly tested update to
glibc-2.5.58.  I used rpmbone to find and download the
following rpms in a directory ( ~/downloads/glibc for me ):

   glibc-2.5-49.el5_5.7.i386.rpm
   glibc-common-2.5-49.el5_5.7.i386.rpm
   glibc-devel-2.5-49.el5_5.7.i386.rpm
   glibc-headers-2.5-49.el5_5.7.i386.rpm
   nscd-2.5-49.el5_5.7.i386.rpm

I used rpm --oldpackage -Uvh * to install these.  However,
some of my personal gnome .directories were still messed
up.  I use dirvish for backups, so I went to my April 4th
nightly image, and restored the data from these directories:

   .gconf/
   .gconfd/
   .gnome2/
   .metacity/
   .nautilus/

I don't know which of those was actually needed, but I liked
my desktop on April 4 a lot better than this morning, so I 
removed and replaced all those recently changed directories
on my machine.  I hope someone can tell us what files really
need changing, and what can be left as-is.

Now to do that to a few other broken machines, and to turn off
updates for glibc and nscd until a better update comes along,
by adding this line to /etc/yum.conf:

   exclude glibc* nscd*

While I realize that I may lose some security protection this
way, it is better to run insecure than to not be able to work.
I hope I don't have to wait long before we get a new update
that actually works:

Keith
-- 
Keith Lofstrom          [log in to unmask]         Voice (503)-520-1993
KLIC --- Keith Lofstrom Integrated Circuits --- "Your Ideas in Silicon"
Design Contracting in Bipolar and CMOS - Analog, Digital, and Scan ICs