recent rh9 updates broke rpm?

[Damian Menscher <menscher uiuc edu>]

Looking to see if anyone else had this problem this week:

Setup: I have eight identical machines running RH9 using yum in a 
nightly cronjob to install the legacy updates.  This has all worked 
perfectly for the past year or so (except for occasional hiccups due to 
bad downloads, etc).  Recently there was a kernel update, and I rebooted 
all 8 machines on Feb 27 at 15:04.  Yum continued to run nightly since 
then, and has installed the cups updates of March 2/3 on all machines 
without incident (some got it Mar 2, some Mar 3 due to network 
flakiness).  Therefore I doubt that the reboot is directly related.

Two nights ago, I got email reports from 4 of the 8 machines indicating 
that yum had segfaulted.  I guessed it was a network glitch, but last 
night I got two more segfaults, and two machines with a hung yum process 
(waiting for a futex() to unlock).

Questions: Why did this affect only half of my machines?  How could the 
RPM databases have been broken?  The update that seems to be killing 
them is less-378-7.2.legacy, which has managed to get installed even on 
two of the broken machines.

Finally, I know the standard thing-to-do is rm -f /var/lib/rpm/__db* and 
install a more recent version of rpm.  But I've already got rpm-4.2-1 on 
these machines, so those locking issues shouldn't be causing a problem. 
Besides, the reboot would have done that rm -f as part of rc.sysinit.

Anyone else have this problem with this week's updates?  It'd be nice to 
know that it's not just me....  Other suggestions also welcome.

Damian Menscher
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