On Tuesday June 19 2007 9:01:21 am Eric wrote: > >> When RPM seems to stop working, the locks are the most likely issue > > Just to clarify, then, are the __db.00x files the lock files? I thought of > lock files but looked through /var/lock (where I would have expected such > files to be) and didn't see anything that was likely to be relevant. We're all busy, Eric. You can't take the time to glance at two days worth of list traffic, but I should summarize my efforts of over 36 hours for you. You have time to post quite a lot on your problem here, and you seem to have the time to drive to the next city over if you must -- imagine how your request came across to me --- OK, we'll forget about it My problems were very similar All package management GUI based systems, Yumex, Smart, and Synaptic started failing in mid-update on Saturday. They would generally just freeze - there was no CPU activity, I wasn't able to use killall to stop the process, nothing. I would be forced to log out of the session and then back in. Probably, those hung sessions resulted in some partial installs and other corruption, but I'm guessing. Yum from the command line would yield up strange messages about a truncated freetype file, and would generally produce a segmentation fault in mid update. On an experienced package maintainer's suggestion from this list, I deleted the __db.0X files, I deleted all of them and then ran rpm --rebuilddb That partially solved my problems, though not all - things got much better - then... Re-installing the freetype package never fixed that truncated file problem - on another suggestion from someone with a lot of experience, I simply deleted the truncated file, and then reinstalled the freetype package -- that fixed that; that fixed that issue, but, the machine's selinux lablels were so borked that it wouldn't start up in enforcing mode, and I'm convinced that was also causing other problems - package updates were mostly working now, but there would still be strange phenomena such as the package management window shutting down suddenly at the end of an update, instead of waiting for me to close it Selinux was entirely borked - don't dismiss that as a possible part of your problem, Until I fixed that, everything didn't come back fully to normal. Here's the thread subject lines so you can find them easily: "Package managers gone haywire! yum, apt, rpm: pam is totally borked" "Selinux so badly corrupted machine can't start" If you click on the link at the very bottom of this message, below my signature, where it says to unsubscribe.... you can also get to the archives by following that link and it's easy to look at the past few days messages. The link for the archives will be at the very top of that confusingly described 'unsubscribe' page I ended up reinstalling all the packages that had come in since Saturday, about 22 in all, during this process -- now, the machine is completely stable. There are a lot of little details in those two threads I've probably passed over -- take five minutes to read them -- it may save you a drive across town -- Claude Jones Brunswick, MD
