If you’re using a Virtuozzo-based VPS running Debian Testing or Unstable (and probably other modern Linux distributions), you will probably run into problems regarding the patches used in the default kernel and glibc 2.7, which were properly described in the debian-glibc mailing list.

Tektonic, my current provider, will upgrade the kernel this weekend but if you’re really in a hurry, you can set your VPS on repair mode, download a 2.6 version of libc6, install it from the repair VPS using dpkg –root=/repair –force-all –install … and restart your VPS. It will boot up, but lots of things that depend on versioned packages of libc6 won’t work correctly, most notably OpenSSH and PAM.

The problem is due to non-standard TUX optimization patches implemented over Red Hat’s standard kernels, which seem to be quite popular in Virtuozzo-based VPSs (at least it seems that Strato, Tektonic and Unixshell use them?)