Re: /lib deleted

[Dennis Stosberg <lists@stosberg.net>]

theal wrote:

> The /lib directory was deleted by accidentally on one of my
> servers. Does anyone know of a way to recover this?

Your best and simplest option is, of course, to restore your latest
backup.  But since you're asking here, I assume that no backup
exists.	 

I don't think it a good idea to copy the /lib directory from another
machine as long as the configuration of that machine is not 100
percent identical to yours.  Unless the configurations are
identical, you would certainly miss some needed libraries and on the
other hand have unneeded libraries lying around in /lib, which are
not part of any package and will never be removed. The /lib
directory also includes the kernel module files, which will simply
not work for you if the kernel version and configuration is not
identical.

The Debian package system keeps a list of installed packages and
every single file which every single package installs in
/var/lib/dpkg/info.  If you start your system using a rescue CD, or
any other cd-based linux distribution (Knoppix, Ubuntu live CDs,
etc.) and use that information, you will probably be able to
reinstall exactly those packages, which install files in /lib.

If you grep through the *.list files in the directory, you will see
that only a few packages install files in /lib -- on my desktop
system about 40 packages:

   grep -m1 ^/lib /var/lib/dpkg/info/*.list

When you have the package names you can get the packages from your
local Debian mirror (or /var/cache/apt/) and reinstall them on your
system. See the --root option of dpkg for that. 

Regards,
Dennis

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