SuSE 9.0: Illegal instruction on i686, glibc corrupted

Symptom

You have freshly installed SuSE 9.0 on an Intel Pentium III (or higher?) processor machine. Everything works fine. After the first new boot several services crash with Illegal Instruction. The graphical login does not work. Even the ps command crashes:

# ps


Signal 4 (ILL) caught by ps (procps version 3.1.11).
Please send bug reports to <feedback@lists.sf.net> or <albert@users.sf.net>

Reason

The glibc for Intel i686 architecture in /lib/i686 has been corrupted. I (I do not know yet how this could happen).

RPM reveales that the package glibc in fact has been modified:

# rpm -V glibc
..5.....   /lib/i686/libc.so.6

Solution

First delete /lib/i686/libc.so.6 in order to make things work for the while. Then reinstall the glibc package for i686 architecture from the CD/DVD:

# rm /lib/i686/libc.so.6
# mount /dev/dvd /mnt
# rpm -U /mnt/suse/suse/i686/glibc-2.3.2-88.i686.rpm --force