up2date vs. /etc/ld.so.conf

[Jeffrey Pyne]

So, I decided I wanted to give CUPS a try on my RedHat 8.0 system yesterday.
I ran "up2date cups" and it looked like up2date did its thing like it always
does.  But when I tried running lpadmin, I got an error about not being able
to find a shared library (libkrb5.so.3, IIRC).  "Huh, that's odd," thought
I.  Then I realized that other things were b0rken, too, complaining about
not being able to find various shared libraries.  So I tried to cat
/etc/ld.so.conf... and it was missing!  I tried manually recreating the
file, but I couldn't-- even as root.  (I believe "Permission denied" or "I/O
error" was the message I got.)  I ended up having to boot into single luser
mode and "rm -f /etc/ld.so.conf" (even though ls showed that it didn't
exist), and then manually recreate it. 

So 2 questions:

1) There are a few things that still don't seem to work.  I added in the
libraries I could think of off the top of my head (/lib, /usr/lib,
/usr/X11R6/lib, /usr/kerberos/lib), but I'm pretty sure I'm still missing a
bunch.  Could some kind soul send me the contents of their /etc/ld.so.conf
from a RedHat 8.0 system (with Gnome and KDE installed) so I can add the
rest of the lib directories I seem to be missing?

2) Has anyone ever seen anything like this before?  My friend Google tells
me that similar behavior can occur when installing Sybase RPMs, but I was
using up2date to install CUPS.  One would think this would be a pretty safe
operation.

TIA,

~Jeff