[CentOS] Upgrade 3.4 --> 3.7 went awry: rpmdb hosed

William L. Maltby BillsCentOS at triad.rr.com
Fri Jul 7 13:08:42 UTC 2006


On Fri, 2006-07-07 at 07:13 -0400, Matt Hyclak wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 06, 2006 at 05:40:10PM -0700, Bart Schaefer enlightened us:
> > <snip>

> > I got an error message from db4 saying to "RUN RECOVERY".
> > 
> > I did "rpm --rebuilddb" which may have been the wrong thing -- it
> > issued an error about "pages missing".  I then ran it again, and it
> > came back with no errors, but after rebooting (for the kernel update)
> > "rpm -qa" lists only a dozen packages or so, of which "rpm" is not
> > one, and "yum check-update" chokes, showing Null for $releasever and
> > the empty string for $basearch.
> > 
> > This was a brand-new system, so I'm thinking I'll just download the
> > 3.7 ISOs and re-install, but on the off chance there's some other way
> > to recover from this I thought I'd ask.  There doesn't seem to be
> > anything missing other than a large chunk of the RPM database itself.
> 
> Coincidentally, there is a thread regarding this happening right now over on
> the nahant mailing list:
> 
> https://www.redhat.com/archives/nahant-list/2006-July/msg00011.html

Having been around (but nevertheless still ignorant of RPM) when RPM
suffered the indignity of having its DBM upgraded, I have been creating
three yum-based lists in /var after each update. The one which I think I
love the most is the installed list. However, my ardor may be misplaced
due to my relative ignorance about these things. My thinking is that I
can use that list, with a small amount of scripting and/or manual
editing, to recover the rpmdb if I need to. I could also make a list
from RPM itself, but I like the "trust but verify" philosophy that is
satisfied by getting a list from a different source (hmmm... is *that*
source trustworthy?   ;-).

Anyway, all that presumes that recovery from my periodic backups are not
reasonable for some reason.

My question: am I missing the mark? Should I really be doing a list only
from RPM or is the YUM list (suf/de)ficient?

> 
> Matt
> 

TIA
-- 
Bill
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