Recovering from Bad FreeBSD Packages

Recently I've encountered problems with some of the packages built by the FreeBSD team. In the case I described earlier, libtclx8.4.so and libmysqltcl.so.3 were somehow damaged in the .tbz packages I installed on one of my systems. I recovered by using good copies from another system.

Yesterday I ran into the following error after I upgraded my packages.

orr:/home/richard$ firefox
/libexec/ld-elf.so.1: /usr/local/lib/libplds4.so.1:
 Undefined symbol "gethostbyname_r"

orr:/home/richard$ thunderbird
/libexec/ld-elf.so.1: /usr/local/lib/libplds4.so.1:
 Undefined symbol "gethostbyname_r"

Uh oh. Email I can live without, but it's difficult to troubleshoot a problem without a Web browser. I had to turn to another laptop running Windows (for shame) to search for clues. I found one post on a Chinese Website with the same errors, but nothing else.

I found the pkg-plist for the linux-firefox and linux-thunderbird ports contained this entry:

lib/%%APP_NAME%%/libplds4.so

so it appeared the problem was one in the package for Firefox and Thunderbird.

I don't run either app on other computers, so I decided to try recovering by building new packages myself. I built them on another system, poweredge.

poweredge:/usr/ports/www/firefox# make package-recursive BATCH=1

I used "BATCH=1" to accept the defaults, thereby avoiding problems where the build process stops while waiting for me to select various options. I used package-recursive so the end result would include all packages needed for Firefox, in the event I needed to do a wholesale replacement of packages on my primary system.

When done I compared the libraries on the broken and package building systems.

orr:/home/richard$ ls -al /usr/local/lib/libpld*
-rw-r--r--  1 root  wheel    8960 Sep 24 02:59 /usr/local/lib/libplds4.a
lrwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel      13 Sep 24 02:59 /usr/local/lib/libplds4.so
 -> libplds4.so.1
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  184784 Sep 24 02:59 /usr/local/lib/libplds4.so.1

poweredge:/home/richard$ ls -al /usr/local/lib/libpld*
-rw-r--r--  1 root  wheel    8960 Oct  3 17:32 /usr/local/lib/libplds4.a
lrwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel      13 Oct  3 17:32 /usr/local/lib/libplds4.so
 -> libplds4.so.1
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  185062 Oct  3 17:32 /usr/local/lib/libplds4.so.1

The sizes are certainly different -- no need to hash them. I then copied over the 185062 file from poweredge and moved the 184784 version on orr out of the way. Sure enough, I was able to start Firefox and Thunderbird without any problems with the new libplds4.so.1 in place.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Zeek in Action Videos

Image
This is a quick note to point blog readers to my Zeek in Action YouTube video series for the Zeek network security monitoring project .  Each video addresses a topic that I think might be of interest to people trying to understand their network using Zeek and adjacent tools and approaches, like Suricata, Wireshark, and so on.  I am especially pleased with Video 6 on monitoring wireless networks . It took me several weeks to research material for this video. I had to buy new hardware and experiment with a Linux distro that I had not used before -- Parrot .  Please like and subscribe, and let me know if there is a topic you think might make a good video.
Read more

MITRE ATT&CK Tactics Are Not Tactics

Image
Just what are "tactics"? Introduction MITRE ATT&CK  is a great resource, but something about it has bothered me since I first heard about it several years ago. It's a minor point, but I wanted to document it in case it confuses anyone else. The MITRE ATT&CK Design and Philosophy document from March 2020 says the following: At a high-level, ATT&CK is a behavioral model that consists of the following core components: • Tactics, denoting short-term, tactical adversary goals during an attack; • Techniques, describing the means by which adversaries achieve tactical goals; • Sub-techniques, describing more specific means by which adversaries achieve tactical goals at a lower level than techniques; and • Documented adversary usage of techniques, their procedures, and other metadata. My concern is with MITRE's definition of "tactics" as "short-term, tactical adversary goals during an attack," which is oddly recursive. The key word in the tacti...
Read more

New Book! The Best of TaoSecurity Blog, Volume 4

Image
  I've completed the TaoSecurity Blog book series . The new book is  The Best of TaoSecurity Blog, Volume 4: Beyond the Blog with Articles, Testimony, and Scholarship .  It's available now for Kindle , and I'm working on the print edition.  I'm running a 50% off promo on Volumes 1-3 on Kindle through midnight 20 April. Take advantage before the prices go back up. I described the new title thus: Go beyond TaoSecurity Blog with this new volume from author Richard Bejtlich. In the first three volumes of the series, Mr. Bejtlich selected and republished the very best entries from 18 years of writing and over 18 million blog views, along with commentaries and additional material.  In this title, Mr. Bejtlich collects material that has not been published elsewhere, including articles that are no longer available or are stored in assorted digital or physical archives. Volume 4 offers early white papers that Mr. Bejtlich wrote as a network defender, either for technica...
Read more