Your JoeDog uses Ubuntu Linux on his laptop. A few years ago he was deep in siege development and he was caught without a working copy. “I wonder if … ” Your JoeDog thought, “I wonder if Ubuntu has it.” He ran ‘sudo apt-get install siege’ and there it was, ready for installation. The Big Boys were distributing his software and Your JoeDog was convinced that he was a Somebody.

If this happens to you, if a major vendor starts to distribute your software and you feel the need to tell people about it, take an opportunity to learn this lesson: nobody gives a shit. It’s a great feeling so you’ll probably ignore it. You’ll puff your chest and tell people, “Debian is distributing my software!” Instead of a pat on the back, you’ll hear “What’s Debian?” You’ll tell them and they’ll quickly change the subject. Trust the JoeDog on this one: nobody gives a shit. Your wife might give you a poorly acted, “That’s great, honey.” but at the end of the day, your software project excites people as much as your fantasy football team.

Now turn the clock up a few years. Yesterday Your JoeDog had an encounter with a with a compromised Mormon dating site. He wanted to see what software they were running so he ran ‘siege -g http://singlesaints.com/’ on his snazzy new System76 laptop. Turns out he didn’t have a copy. But wait a second: Ubuntu distributes siege, remember?

“What’s Ubuntu?” — See, I told you nobody cares.

When he went to run that command with Ubuntu’s siege he got this message: ‘siege: error while loading shared libraries: libssl.so.1.0.0: No such file or directory’

In recent days, our log aggregator has been telling us that many of you are googling ‘ubuntu siege libssl’ and it suddenly became clear why you were doing that. This nerdblogger decided to investigate the cause and document it here. As a diligent nerdblogger, he uninstalled siege in order to document the the problem from scratch. Funny thing. When he ran siege after the second install in order to capture the error message, there was no error message. Siege worked.

At this point all that is known is this:

1. There appears to be a problem with siege on Ubuntu
2. Here’s the error message: libssl.so.1.0.0: No such file of directory’
3. libssl.so.1.0.0 was installed on the laptop in which this error was encountered
4. After removing siege with ‘sudo apt-get remove siege’ and
5. Reinstalling it with ‘sudo apt-get install siege’
6. It worked.
7. Your mileage will vary. If the problem persists you should post to the Ubuntu forums