RPM stopped working

[Thomas Cameron]

On Tue, 2005-06-14 at 22:15 +0100, Leon Stringer wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> RPM has suddenly stopped working. If I try to install a package at the
> command line the process never completes i.e. I hit return and nothing
> else happens and I eventually have to kill it.
> 
> I thought the problem could be the database but I can't rebuild it. I
> tried with the debugging options and just get:
> 
> # rpm --rebuilddb -vv
> D: rebuilding database /var/lib/rpm into /var/lib/rpmrebuilddb.4560
> D: creating directory /var/lib/rpmrebuilddb.4560
> D: opening old database with dbapi 3
> D: opening  db environment /var/lib/rpm/Packages joinenv
> D: opening  db index       /var/lib/rpm/Packages rdonly mode=0x0
> 
> and that's it, no disk activity, no response after half an hour.
> 
> Can anyone suggest how I might fix or troubleshoot this?
> 
> (FC4t3 with up to date packages.)

I would make sure that there are no hung rpm processes (maybe reboot to
single user mode just to be sure).  Then make a backup of /var/lib/rpm,
maybe like this:

tar zcvf /tmp/var.lib.rpm.tar.gz /var/lib/rpm

Then remove all the __db* files in /var/lib/rpm, maybe like this:

rm -f /var/lib/rpm/__db*

Then rebuild the rpm database, maybe like this:

rpm ----rebuilddb

See if that works and report back?

Thomas