Eh...so I learned how to compile util-linux. Then I figured I'd remove the one from the package manager, and then drop-in my new one. But when I ran yum, it removed everything! Well, it removed a lot of stuff, destroying my ability to sudo or remote terminal.

At the moment, I'm working on getting my machine back to normal, but in the mean time, is there an option or prompt for yum remove that I missed? Also, I suspect many programs may be expecting a certain version of the util-linux files, and therefore fail, but this I'm really uncertain of.

Hello! I got distracted from this for a while, but I'm getting back to it.

I'm looking up the util-linux package to learn what to do,but I have a question that I hope would save me some unnecessarily lost time.

On my server, I have util-linux-ng.i686 rpm package installed (it shows up in yum list installed; it came that way on the machine). So I think I ought to uninstall that package (yum remove), then compile and install the new util-linux (from https://github.com/karelzak/util-linux?) - correct?

It appears linux-utils is the same as util-linux, correct?

@mfillpot - thanks, swapon is what I tried at first and it failed. I searched about the error and hit that godaddy support thread that I posted. I still tried changing fstab and rebooting, but doesn't appear to have done anything.

Excellent, thanks!

Hi, not sure if this is the right place to ask this question, but how can I put a hyperlink to my blog in my signature?

Thanks, Rubberman. I have learned that I cannot create swap space because I'm using a godaddy virtual dedicated server. http://support.godaddy.com/groups/web-hosting/forum/topic/am-i-allowed-to-setup-swap-disk-on-vps/

FYI, my swap space appears to be 0 bytes. As I understand it, swap space sort of extends the actual amount of RAM that can be used, and so here I have 0. This implies that my system was attempting to allocate more than 1GB of RAM.

Is there a log file I can check to see how much RAM the system was attempting to allocate at the time that I was running this build?

Here is the /proc/meminfo snapshot.

MemTotal: 1048576 kB
MemFree: 976056 kB
Buffers: 0 kB
Cached: 0 kB
SwapCached: 0 kB
Active: 0 kB
Inactive: 0 kB
HighTotal: 0 kB
HighFree: 0 kB
LowTotal: 1048576 kB
LowFree: 976056 kB
SwapTotal: 0 kB
SwapFree: 0 kB
Dirty: 0 kB
Writeback: 0 kB
AnonPages: 0 kB
Mapped: 0 kB
Slab: 0 kB
PageTables: 0 kB
NFS_Unstable: 0 kB
Bounce: 0 kB
CommitLimit: 0 kB
Committed_AS: 0 kB
VmallocTotal: 0 kB
VmallocUsed: 0 kB
VmallocChunk: 0 kB
HugePages_Total: 0
HugePages_Free: 0
HugePages_Rsvd: 0
Hugepagesize: 2048 kB

@mfilpot, yeah, I should have written it down. I believe it was an malloc out of memory exception. It didn't really say much else than that. I'm guessing that I have somewhat less than 20GB of free space; that's how much comes with the plan, and I haven't installed anything except for apache.

@Rubberman, not sure how much swap space is allocated. I'll check tonight.

@marc, is that so? It could see compiles requiring a lot of memory to hold all the definitions and trees.

FYI, the installation was successful - happy!

I was doing the build step for apache http server, and I kept getting this error saying something could not allocate memory. I did some searching, and I didn't exactly find an answer, but it seems that the problem may have been that my server just didn't have enough memory to execute the make in one go. So I kept on trying, and that seems to have worked (still working on the apache installation).

My question is: do you think the lack of memory was really the problem here? I just setup this virtual dedicated linux server with godaddy. It's the smallest version, economy, but it says it has 1GB of RAM, so I'm surprised.

ok, thanks