Posted by rmcgowan on Sat 19 Nov 2005 at 17:16
Well, that may be an overstatement, though I have no idea at this point. What I do know is that the first signs were that 'ssh' failed to configure correctly. The configuration kept bombing on running 'ssh-keygen', with a SIGSEGV. I was able to determine that this file was bad, by comparing with another Debian install. To make a long story short, I eventually determined that I had the following list of files installed from the 'ssh' package:
# dpkg -L ssh /. /usr /usr/bin /usr/bin/ssh /usr/bin/scp /usr/bin/ssh-add /usr/bin/ssh-agent /usr/bin/ssh-keygen
Needless to say, there are a lot of files missing. Now, because of the configuration problem with ssh, packages kdessh, kdeutils and kde were also not configured. In order to get some semblance of normalcy, I've copied the 'ssh-keygen' from my laptop, plus a couple of other files, enough to get past the configuration problem. This is just a stop gap, while I figure out how to fix things the 'right' way.
I've gone through the man page for dpkg and apt, looking for something that would tell me the actual status of the ssh install, but nothing I've tried reports any problems at all. It thinks everything is fine, thank you.
So, my question. Is there a tool that will actually find and report on broken installs? I had the impression that I could do it with apt or dpkg, but neither seem to be able to detect the problem I have with this ssh install. Which leaves me wondering how many other packages might be invisibly broken.
I've also not tried to remove ssh, since those other packages all have dependencies on it, such that they would also be removed. I really don't want to have my window system go away. Though that may be the only way to fix this, short of re-installing, which I'd really rather not do.
Thanks for your help.
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