Oops, I blew away dpkg/dselect

[Matt Wehland <mattw@webtripper.com>]

Well I screwed the pooch on this one.
I am rebuilding a potatoe system for a web/mail server.  I wanted to use 
some newer packages (latest mailman, postfix etc).
Somewhere there was a dependency for a newer version of dpkg.  No problem I 
just dl the latest dpgk and added it to my local repository (I also dl 
whatever dependency's were required).
The problem comes in that while upgrading something puked but the older 
version of dpkg was removed (yes I had to type in 'removing this may screw 
up your system' or something like that).
The newer version of dpkg wasn't installed.  Now I can't install anything, 
including dpkg (either version) since dselect (or apt-get) return and error 
'/usr/bin/dpkg' returned and error.  Not suprising since dpkg isn't there.
I am just in the process of rebuilding this system so starting over doesn't 
really bother me (I actually want to try some new things I've learned to 
par down the packages installed).
But I would like to learn how to get around this problem in case I manage 
to do something this stupid in the future on a more important system.

The only solution I can think of is to copy the binaries I need off of 
another system.

Any else have any other ideas?

I will be playing with this more when I get home from work later.

Thanks,
Matt



   Matt Wehland     mwehland@webtripper.com
          Computer Network Specialist
                       MCSE CCNA