A systems administrator applies the latest OS security patches to a production Linux server that hosts a custom financial application. Following the mandatory reboot, the application service fails to start. The administrator inspects the application's error logs and discovers messages stating, "error while loading shared libraries... cannot open shared object file: incompatible version". The server and the application were fully functional before the update. Which of the following is the MOST likely cause of this application failure?
The patch file was corrupted during download and did not install correctly.
The security patch updated a shared library to a version that is incompatible with the application.
The server has insufficient disk space, preventing the application from starting.
The application's service account permissions were reset during the patching process.
The correct answer is that the security patch updated a shared library to a version incompatible with the application. OS updates and patches often include updated versions of shared system libraries for security and functionality improvements. However, custom-developed applications can be dependent on specific versions of these libraries. When a library is updated to a version the application was not designed for, it can lead to dependency conflicts, causing the application to fail. The error message "incompatible version" in the logs points directly to this cause. This scenario is a classic example of a downstream failure caused by an update.
Reset service account permissions would likely produce 'access denied' errors, not library version errors.
A corrupted patch file would more likely cause the entire update process to fail rather than causing a specific post-reboot runtime error.
Insufficient disk space would prevent new log entries or cause other file-write errors, which is not the issue indicated by the specific error message.