[TriLUG] rpm problems on RH80?

[Jeremy Portzer]

On Thu, 2003-02-06 at 10:21, lfwelty wrote:
> Anyone noticed flakiness w/ rpm on rh80?
> 
> Long story short: reinstall rh80 system's choking HARD on the
> rpm nightly cron (freezing the system at 04:02EST) and inconsistent
> rpm queries/updates/installs (often fail, sometimes work).

This is a known problem with RPM on Red Hat Linux 8.  When RPM hangs,
you need to kill the process (with -9 if necessary, but try -15 first),
and then execute rm -f /var/lib/rpm/__db.*   This has been in RHL 8
since the beginning; I still can't imagine why they've never released an
errata to fix this.

Removing those lock files should fix the problem, but if you still can't
do things after that, run "rpm --rebuilddb" to rebuild your RPM
database.

The reason that rebooting appears to fix this is that those __db* files
are removed by one of the bootup scripts.  Remember, rebooting is almost
*never* necessary in Linux. :-)

--Jeremy