libc.so.6: Cannot open shared object file: Permission denied

[Toralf Lund]

After upgrading my Fedora Core 3 machine to Fedora Core 4, I started 
getting a really weird problem. During startup I see a lot of messages 
of the form:

libc.so.6: Cannot open shared object file: Permission denied

And the system just won't boot properly.

The strange bit is that libc.so.6 is quite definitely there. I can start 
up in single user mode and run the shell as well as most (all?) file 
utilities etc. (and they all use libc, obviously.) There are, however, 
*some* commands that will give the error message indicated above. One of 
them is /sbin/kmodule - which I tried executing because I noticed it's 
one of the first commands in the boot sequence.

When I run with LD_DEBUG=libs, I notice that /sbin/kmodule will search 
through all directories in the path for libc.so.6 - including /lib - 
then give up. Commands like cat, ls etc., on the other hand, will fetch 
/lib/libc.so.6 directly based on info in /etc/ld.so.cache. Unless I 
remove the cache first, in which case these will also search the path up 
until /lib, the successufully load the libc.so.6 there.

Does anyone have any idea about what is going on? Why would some 
programs be able to open /lib/libc.so.6, others not? HELP!

- Toralf