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Nov. 2nd, 2008 12:21 pmHi everyone! I will be writing a puzzlehunt post shortly; but first I bring you another puzzle.
For reasons I will not go into here, rlambert currently has a laptop with many useful things missing from /lib; things like ld-linux.so. The laptop is still running; she has a browser and a terminal already open, and has sworn she won't close them. But very few things will run in the terminal, besides bash which is already open. (She also has pidgin open. If you give her advice directly, rather than by commenting on this post, please make sure you don't make anything worse.)
She has a complete copy of /lib residing elswhere.
The puzzle is: How can she restore /lib with only what she has available?
I've pointed out to her that there may be no solution that doesn't involve rebooting from removable media; but for the sake of exercise, try to find a solution she can do that doesn't require that. (She doesn't have another computer handy, and she doesn't have a CD drive; there may be solutions involving making a bootable USB drive using her own computer, and then booting from it, but unless you can prove without rebooting that her hardware can boot USB drives, that's a risky strategy.)
Feel free to make any reasonable assumptions (I'll let you know if they turn out to be wrong); or if you have her contact info, contact her and ask anything you need to know, and post it here in the comments. [But don't tell her to run any command that might make things worse!]
Go, lazywebs, go! ;-)
ETA: FYI to people reading this, we are helping her out in #cslounge. One correct solution to the puzzle (there may be others) was:
LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/backup-copy-of-lib /backup-copy-of-lib/ld-linux.so.2 command
To get something to run even in this fucked-up state.
Now we're trying to sort out the fact that she can't copy it back, due to the same reason she originally had a problem, which is that she's out of disk in /, combined with the fact that the copy of the files out of lib was done with cp -r, which caused all the symlinks to blow up into full-on files. (None of this is her fault; someone put her up to it. ;-)
For reasons I will not go into here, rlambert currently has a laptop with many useful things missing from /lib; things like ld-linux.so. The laptop is still running; she has a browser and a terminal already open, and has sworn she won't close them. But very few things will run in the terminal, besides bash which is already open. (She also has pidgin open. If you give her advice directly, rather than by commenting on this post, please make sure you don't make anything worse.)
She has a complete copy of /lib residing elswhere.
The puzzle is: How can she restore /lib with only what she has available?
I've pointed out to her that there may be no solution that doesn't involve rebooting from removable media; but for the sake of exercise, try to find a solution she can do that doesn't require that. (She doesn't have another computer handy, and she doesn't have a CD drive; there may be solutions involving making a bootable USB drive using her own computer, and then booting from it, but unless you can prove without rebooting that her hardware can boot USB drives, that's a risky strategy.)
Feel free to make any reasonable assumptions (I'll let you know if they turn out to be wrong); or if you have her contact info, contact her and ask anything you need to know, and post it here in the comments. [But don't tell her to run any command that might make things worse!]
Go, lazywebs, go! ;-)
ETA: FYI to people reading this, we are helping her out in #cslounge. One correct solution to the puzzle (there may be others) was:
LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/backup-copy-of-lib /backup-copy-of-lib/ld-linux.so.2 command
To get something to run even in this fucked-up state.
Now we're trying to sort out the fact that she can't copy it back, due to the same reason she originally had a problem, which is that she's out of disk in /, combined with the fact that the copy of the files out of lib was done with cp -r, which caused all the symlinks to blow up into full-on files. (None of this is her fault; someone put her up to it. ;-)
