Notes from the not-so-leading edge

Posted Nov 22, 2006 19:03 UTC (Wed) by nicku (subscriber, #777)
Parent article: Notes from the leading edge

I learned and needed to type

rm /var/lib/rpm/__db*

on my (non-rawhide) Fedora boxes for well over one year now.

The two main problems with Fedora Core are:

There is little effort towards collaboration and overall quality control between various repositories, quite unlike Debian and Ubuntu
rpm is fragile and yum needs resources beyond the wildest dreams of my PII 300MHz laptop.

However, I continue to use Fedora since in every other respect, it works better for me than Ubuntu (X stopped working on the Ubuntu partition on my wistful laptop after dist-upgradeing to edgy.) Unfortunately, I have once had all instances of gnome-terminal terminate simultaneously with little provocation on FC6.

It's odd that I can be such a happy Fedora user!

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Even further from the edge...

Posted Nov 27, 2006 15:36 UTC (Mon) by SiliconSlick (guest, #39955) [Link]

I learned and needed to type
rm /var/lib/rpm/__db*
on my (non-rawhide) Fedora boxes for well over one year now.

Indeed... we've experienced the same problem on CentOS(/RHEL) 4.3/4.4 so often that we have a script to quickly remedy the situation.

$ cat /usr/local/sbin/reset_rpm_db.sh

#!/bin/sh
# resetrpm.sh - reset RPM DB when RPM deadlock occurs - 27mar2006
# run as root/sudo

# Make sure nothing is going to start rpm/yum...

/etc/rc.d/init.d/cfexecd stop
/etc/rc.d/init.d/yum stop

# while current yum/rpm/cfagent sessions...
let MOREPIDS=1
while [ $MOREPIDS -ne 0 ]
do
  let MOREPIDS=0 # assume no more
  # kill them
  for PID in `ps axfu | grep -e yum -e rpm/rpm -e cfagent | grep -v grep | cut -b10-15 | sort`
  do
    let MOREPIDS=1 # there were more
    echo -n "Killing "
    ps axfu | grep $PID | grep -v grep
    kill -9 $PID
  done
done
echo ""
echo "Finished killing hung processes..."

# clean up DB

rm -f /var/lib/rpm/__db.00?

# do a quick query

rpm -q glibc

# restart daemons

/etc/rc.d/init.d/yum start
/etc/rc.d/init.d/cfexecd start
# EOF

(note, we make extensive use of yum/rpm in cfengine).

A lot of our problems _seem_ to stem from problems with NFS mounts, but even when NFS is working flawlessly (and all mounts are available/reliable), the RPM DB still manages to cause hangs on occasion.