another 9.2 upgrade problem - rather urgent

I started the remote upgrade of my first-line public facing server,
which I am accessing now over an OOB remote control console.  The
gulp! bits, like flashing the BIOS and tthe OOB console firmware went
without a hitch, and I have been running what was an 8.0_RC1 machine
with a 9.2 kernel for a few weeks.

I booted the machine in single-user mode, made / writable and mounted
/var and /usr.  I have the  sets'.tar.xz files in /9.2/sets, and set
about unpacking them.  I got an immediate flurry of error messages
about unrecognised archive formats (I was doing tar xpzf base.tar.xz),
and now I find that most of the tools I need do not function.  It ios
all to do with shared libraries not being found, when they are all
there in /lib.  e.g.:

# find / -mtime -1
Shared object "libutil.so.7" not found
#ls -l /lib/libutil.so.7
lrwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  15 May 22  2016 /lib/libutil.so.7 ->
# ls -l /lib/libutil.so.7.21
-r--r--r--  1 root  wheel  105831 May 22  2016 /lib/libutil.so.7.21
# ldd tar
Shared object "libc.so.12" not found
# ls -l /lib/libc.so.12
lrwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  16 May 22  2016 /lib/libc.so.12 ->
libc.so.12.193.1
# ls -l /lib/libc.so.12.193.1
-r--r--r--  1 root  wheel  1616564 May 22  2016 /lib/libc.so.12.193.1

The system will not go multi-user any more because of similar
fail.ures due to shared libraries not being found.  I have a 9.2
machine in the next slot in the rack, but I cannot contact it with no
network configured.  Plus:

# telnet biscay
Shared object "libcrypto.so.14" not found
# ls -l /lib/libcrypto.so.14
ls: /lib/libcrypto.so.14: No such file or directory

There is a symlink in /usr/lib to the non-existent /lib/libcrypto.so.14
with a datestamp of May 12 2021, so it looks as if it was installed
but the real file wasn't.  tar needs libcrypto too. If I destroy the
empty symlink, will it fall back to the pre-existing library?

Suggestions please.

-- 
Steve Blinkhorn <[email protected]>