A week or so ago the HDD started failing on my web server, so I had the DC clone the HDD for me. Some files however got lost in transit (bad sectors) and when I was trying to install nginx to get some testing done, I kept getting this error:

Apparently it wasn’t finding GCC, even though it was definitely installed. After looking around a bit at the system and talking with a few people on IRC #linux, found out that some header files and other files were missing from /usr/include. Here is an example of some of the errors I got with a simple hello world C++ program:

The solution was to go to another server (which I have several) of the same architecture, and SCP (or rsync, take your pick) the /usr/include directory over.

Problem solved.