SUMMARY: /usr/bin/sort: cannot find/execute "sort" in ISA subdirectories

I asked

> I have followed the maze of twisty symlinks almost to the end, but I
> think I need some help for the last step.
>
> I have a Solaris 10 server that, when I patched it (10_Recommended
> from Sun), failed on every patch.  Its identical twin as well as a
> dozen or so other Solaris 10 servers had no problems. Looking through
> the logfile I see that every patch failed with the error
> /usr/bin/sort: cannot find/execute "sort" in ISA subdirectories
> When I googled this error there were lots of talk about the issues
> with chroot and the binaries that are in bin, sparcv7, and sparcv9 and
> hardlinked together.  But that is not the issue here -- no chroot in
> sight.
>
> What I did discover is that four binaries, including sort, in sparcv9
> are invalid symlinks:
> rudun-web001:/usr/tmp22205dir$ cd /usr/bin/sparcv9/
> rudun-web001:/usr/bin/sparcv9$ ls -lFa | grep tmp
> lrwxrwxrwx   1 root     other         26 Apr 17 11:55 pargs -> ../../
> usr/tmp22205dir/p7za
> lrwxrwxrwx   1 root     other         26 Apr 17 11:55 pmap -> ../../
> usr/tmp22205dir/p7za
> lrwxrwxrwx   1 root     other         26 Apr 17 11:55 psig -> ../../
> usr/tmp22205dir/p7za
> lrwxrwxrwx   1 root     other         26 Apr 17 11:55 sort -> ../../
> usr/tmp22205dir/p7za
>
> Hmm.  So let me follow the symlink
>
> rudun-web001:/usr/bin/sparcv9$ cd  ../../usr/tmp22205dir/
> -bash: cd: ../../usr/tmp22205dir/: No such file or directory
>
> ok, is there any directory of a similar name?
>
> rudun-web001:/usr/bin/sparcv9$ cd  ../../usr/tmp*
> -bash: cd: ../../usr/tmp*: No such file or directory
>
> ../../usr is /usr/usr.  That makes no sense.  Let me try removing one
> of the /usr.
>
> rudun-web001:/usr/bin/sparcv9$ cd ../../tmp22205dir/
> rudun-web001:/usr/tmp22205dir$ ls -lFa
> total 288
> drwxr-xr-x   2 root     other        512 Apr 17 11:55 ./
> drwxr-xr-x  35 root     sys         1024 Apr 17 11:55 ../
> -r-xr-xr-x   1 root     bin          577 Sep 13  2005 batch*
> -r-xr-xr-x   1 root     bin        29952 Mar 21  2008 pargs*
> -r-xr-xr-x   1 root     bin        29608 Aug 16  2007 pmap*
> -r-xr-xr-x   1 root     bin        20264 Jun  3  2008 psig*
> -r-xr-xr-x   1 root     bin        62800 Apr 26  2005 sort*
>
> Bingo.  All four are there.  But no "p7za".
>
> So, does anyone have any idea why these four binaries would have been
> moved
> and the symlink pointing to them is wrong?  I probably could just
> carefully
> move these backto sparcv9, but why were they moved in the first place?

According to Casper, these can become symlinks if patching with the  
wrong things mounted lofs.  I checked my mnttab and compared it to  
several other Solaris 10 servers and saw no anomalies.   So I went  
ahead and copied them back to /usr/bin/sparcv9.  The inodes are not  
maching anymore, but the binary is in place.  I will be trying again  
to patch this server on wednesday, so I will find out if it worked.   
Thanks for the ideas, everyone.


Christopher L. Barnard
cbarnar1@earthlink.net
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