rpm -e --force glibc!!!

Ever accidentally uninstall glibc from a Linux system? Well, I have and I can't say I recommend it. You may ask how one does this, since most distros make it fairly difficult to uninstall. Well, I was trying to test the latest Intel xorg drivers to see if it fixed any of the video issues I encountered with the Latitude C400. I wanted to install the newer drivers, so I set up yum to point the the Fedora Rawhide repository (which includes the newer version of the driver) and did an update. Since the driver depended on the kernel and the kernel depended on glibc they all got updated (the kernel got installed, so the old kernel was still on the system). After updating all the packages, I rebooted and tried a number of different xorg configurations to see if I could get X to work better. It didn't :(

I wasn't able to get X to work at all, so I decided to revert back the older versions of all the packages that had been updated. I figured I would just force an uninstall of the packages, remove the Rawhide repository from the yum configuration and reinstall the old packages with yum. It wasn't until I uninstalled all the new packages and tried to run yum again that I realized what I had done. Once glibc was uninstalled, pretty much nothing worked anymore. I did some Google'ing (on another system) and decided the best bet would be to shut the system down and boot in rescue mode to see if I could get glibc reinstalled from rescue mode.

I shut down the system and booted to rescue mode (via PXE, network install, since the laptop does not have a CDROM/DVD drive and does not boot via USB). Once in rescue mode I scp'ed all the glibc packages over from the network install server and ran:
rpm -ivh --relocate /=/mnt/sysimage <glibc packages>

I got an error message (I do not remember exactly what is said), so I looked at the rpm man page and then ran:
rpm -ivh --root /mnt/sysimage <glibc packages>

It ran without error, so I figured it probably did the trick. I shut down the system and let it boot normally. The system came up and X of course failed since I still did not have the Intel drivers installed. I logged into a console and used yum to reinstall all the other packages and got X working again. At that point the system appeared to back to the state it was in before I started experimenting and since it was close to 2am, I decided to go to bed.

Hopefully next time I will realize what I am doing before I force an uninstall of glibc.