Re: DO NOT sysadmin your box after midnight!

[Hal Burgiss <hal foobox net>]

On Fri, Aug 31, 2001 at 12:25:29AM -0400, David Kramer wrote:
> 
> I was cleaning up another partition that used to be a root partition, but
> is now mounted under /oldroot.
> 
> I deleted /var/lib/rpm instead of /oldroot/var/lib/rpm.
> 
> I'm hosed, right?  I tried rpm --initdb abd --rebuilddb, but that just

Hosed, AFAIK. Been there once, when I lost a partition. I guess
re-install is one option. What I did, was get the CD's out, install
all the biggies: glibc*, X*, gcc*, and anything you recognize :) 

Then I wrote a script (details now forgotten), to check all files 
in the key directories (/bin, /usr, /lib, etc), against the rpm contents
on the CD (rpm -qpl) -- one at a time, and generated a list of rpms to
be installed from that. A couple of caveats...if you've done the
updates, then you should substitute those for the ones on the CD(s).
Also, if you've installed any non-stock packages, hopefully you have a
list, or can remember them. Since my adventure, these all go in
/usr/src/redhat/RPMS now. I wound up with a very short list of stuff,
I had no idea what it was. But 99% got taken care of.

Maybe there is a better way. Maybe reinstall would be easier.

> creates an empty database, right?  There's no way to update or delete
> rpm's, and most adds will complain about dependencies, right?

Right.

I did something very similar once moving partitions, and deleted /boot
completely. Luckily I noticed before rebooting :/


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Hal B
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