installation probs on SGI: _socket package removed.

[ophir]

When building python on SGI IRIX646 I've notice that although the
_socket library compiled and linked ok, the 'make' process failed to
import _socket and removed it.
Following the advice I found here at the newsgroup I attempted to
manually compile and link _socket.so, then tried importing it from
python.
The results: An exception was thrown saying the symbol __eprintf was
not defined in the shared object.
Has anyone encountered this problem and have any help on this?
What library is the symbol __eprintf defined in?