While building the shared library (scons -sharedclient) a SONAME isn't defined. The easiest way to do this from scons is to set SHLINKFLAGS to something like "-Wl,-soname=libmongoclient.so.1". Also, the build process should create proper symlinks (for instance, libmongoclient.so.1.6.2 and symlinking .so.1, .so to that file)