Date: Thu, 22 Feb 2007 18:39:22 -0500
From: Sam Varshavchik <mrsam@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
chris@xxxxxxxxxxxx writes:
Lesson learned: *NEVER* kill a yum update, no matter how long it takes.
Come and join the party we're having in another thread.
Seen it. It prompted me to write.
With that out of the way, how SHOULD I have proceeded after trashing an
FC5 or FC6 system that had the database so corrupt that yum and rpm
couldn't run?
Although the rpm database is known to get wonky from times, winding it up in
an unusable state is very rare. It only really happens when corruption and
various cruft has accumulated, slowly, over some time, and your final
"event" pushed things over the edge, over the point of no return.
This had been a pretty stable system, fresh install of FC5 a while back,
with updates along the way and "yum upgrade"-ing to FC6. I got impatient
and ran kill -9 on it. Oh boy.
Manually rm-ing all the __db* files in /var/lib/rpm, and then running "rpm
--rebuilddb" usually manages to repair or minimize the damage, maybe about
99% of the time. It's the remaining 1% of the time that puts you into a
real pickle.
I tried that. Many times. Let it rest a few days, looked around for more
ideas, tried again, formatted the drive.
I'm thinking that without some kind of existing database or repository of
installed RPM's that there's just no way to know what you've got
installed, short of getting all the headers of every version of every
(recent) package and checking if those files exist in the expected places.
No wonder there's no tool for that.
Live and learn.
