on 6-25-2008 5:27 AM Ian Blackwell spake the following:
Thanks to all that offered advice to help solve this for me. Here's a round up for those that may follow in similarly ill-fated foot-steps.
- Don't update/upgrade remotely without using "screen". Dropping the
ssh session caused yum to die inelegantly, with duplicate packages in the RPM database. 2. Analysing the output from /bin/rpm -qa --qf '%{name}-%{version}-%{release}.%{arch}.rpm\n' | sort led me to erase almost 30 new packages that appeared to be duplicates of existing packages. This wasn't without problems though, because I used this command:- yum erase libgcc-4.1.2-42.el5.i386 to remove the duplication noticed here:- libgcc-4.1.2-14.el5.i386.rpm libgcc-4.1.2-42.el5.i386.rpm 3. This broke the machine badly, and caused yum to stop working completely with missing libgcc_s.so.1 being reported as the cause. This also effected other programs, e.g. man wasn't working either. Anyway, long story short, I booted from the 5.1 DVD in rescue mode. I was reluctant to reboot the box in a half upgraded state, but was forced into this due to the corrupt libgcc problem. I then forced the reinstallation of libgcc-4.1.2-14.el5.i386 from the DVD using:- rpm -ivh --force --root /mnt/sysimage libgcc-4.1.2-14.el5.i386.rpm This worked OK and the machine rebooted without a problem (what a relief). 4. Next I tried the yum -y upgrade process again (from the console this time), and to my enormous delight, it downloaded the packages I had removed earlier and then passed all transaction tests and started to process the 577 steps left to upgrade to 5.2. 5. I think there may still be some duplicates, which I'll check for after the upgrade has completed. I didn't get all the way through my analysis of the duplicate package list because of the broken libgcc issue. Having resolved this with the rescue boot, I took a punt on "having done enough" and restarted "yum upgrade". Since it worked, I decided against interrupting it with the view to a subsequent reconciliation.
All being well, I should have an upgraded machine fairly soon.
Thanks again for your prompt and enlightened assistance 8-)
Ian
Something I used on a 4.3 borked upgrade is the following; ---code--- #!/bin/bash
for file in `rpm -qa --queryformat="%{NAME} %{ARCH}\n" | sort | uniq -c | grep -v " 1 " | cut -c 9- | cut -d" " -f1`; do rpm -q --last $file |tail -1 | cut -d" " -f1; done | grep -v gpg-pubkey | xargs rpm -e --justdb --nodeps 2> /tmp/dupes
---code---
Watch the linewraps.
Oh hell, I'll attach it also for posterity!