sudo su command not working in OEL 7

Question

I want to install glibc-2.17-105.el7.i686

But I'm not able to do sudo yum install.

sudo yum install glibc-2.17-105.el7.i686 , gives error

-bash: /usr/local/bin/sudo: /lib/ld-linux.so.2: bad ELF interpreter: No such file or directory

Answer 1

From my experience you are in a bad situation. It's very bad that you have lib errors, I believe because of this error you will have problems running most of your executables on your system and that makes debugging and fixing much harder.

It's most likely a filesystem corruption but I'm not sure if it can be fixed.

I would try to go to single user mode, remount / as read only, then do a fsck on it(depending on your filesystem it may be e2fsck or other).

If it doesn't work, another path would be to boot from a rescue disk and do fsck or try other methods of fixing.

You may have to backup any data and reinstall. Please backup ASAP!

Good luck!

Answer 2

bash: /usr/local/bin/sudo: /lib/ld-linux.so.2: bad ELF interpreter

This means:

1. You have a 32-bit /usr/local/bin/sudo binary and
2. You do not have 32-bit runtime libraries installed.

If you are lucky, you have a 64-bit /usr/bin/sudo (/usr/local/bin is not the default location for sudo). If so, you should be able to do this:

 /usr/bin/sudo rm /usr/local/bin/sudo

after which "normal" 64-bit sudo (which would now be /usr/bin/sudo) will just work.

If you are unlucky, but your system allows root login (and you know root password), then simply login as root, and:

# should make 32-bit /usr/local/bin/sudo work
root@host# yum install glibc-2.17-105.el7.i686 

If you have no root password, and no working sudo, not all is lost: with physical access to the system, you could boot off the recovery disk, mount your root filesystem, and fix root password. You may as well copy a working sudo to /usr/bin at the same time.