Red Hat 7.0 was working fine, now needs libncurses.so.4??

Hi,

I installed RedHat 7.0 about a year ago on this server where I only use it as an anonymous FTP server. Nothing changes on this server other than the occasional upload of a file by me and lots of downloads by people who need the game mod files I host.

For some inexplicable reason, the anonymous FTP server will not allow anyone access via a web browser. I can get in via WS_FTP, but anyone trying to get a file via a browser keeps getting asked to login. Now, I know this can happen if the FTP server is getting hammered (which is possible since it doesn't seem to be working), but here's the scary part . . .

I went into the server via telnet and was able to login, but when I went to run the "top" command, I got this error: error while loading shared libraries: libncurses.so.4: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory. I also have Webmin installed on this server and there are no running processes other than one 999 PID which is "no longer running". All this looks pretty scary to me.

It seems like the server has some weirdness going on, bad weirdness at that. How could it be fine and dandy and now this? I haven't touched the thing. How can part of the FTP server seem to be working and the web access not?

I'm afraid I'm going to have to re-install Linux again, but if there's any way around that, suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

curses is a screen handling program for terminal applications, which top and a bunch of other apps (like the mysql client) use. I don't see how an ftp server daemon could be impacted by it at all.

Have you installed anything recently?

Yup, it does sound like strange stuff is happening. When's the last time you rebooted? What happens when you reboot? Have you updated your distro from ftp://updates.redhat.com for the newest bug fixes?

Yep, rebooted several times (sorry, I should've said that in my first post). Yeah, I figured that if the server was truly pooched it would go completely to pieces on the reboot, but nope . . . still comes up in one piece by the looks of it with the exception of that top command and the anonymous FTP server allowing people to download files via links from HTML pages.

I have not touched this machine other than to upload the occasional file. I have not installed or de-installed anything since I first set it up and it has worked fine all this time. As for updating the distro, I've always adhered to the adage, if it ain't broke . . . leave it the heck alone. But I guess I should start thinking of joining that RedHat Network.

Oh man. You REALLY need to get new packages on this puppy- there was a major exploit in wu-ftpd patched recently, and any number of fixes out there.

You don't need to pay to get the updates. Just ftp to updates.redhat.com and get everything. I haven't had a redhat system break because of updated packages yet. . .

Hero,

Argh! Yes, you are quite right. I'm going to re-install the OS this weekend and I'll get all those updates before I go live with it.

Thanks!