I am experiencing a problem with yum on one of my CentOS-5.5 systems. Specifically, on Friday past (July 16), I ran yum update as root. Yum displayed all of the outdated packages and asked if I wanted to proceed. An answered yes. This first package downloaded was nss. At this point yum simply stopped processing or responding. A ctrl-c at the yum session terminal window did not interrupt the task. Top did not display any yum processes.
I killed that particular process to regain the console session, but I had to use -9 because nothing else worked. Yum continues to behave in this strange manner. Any invocation of yum with any option just stops responding.
Before I manually remove yum and reinstall it using rpm could anyone provide a clue as to what might be happening here and how it might be cured. I found this one entry from yum in the log files:
/var/log/messages.1:Jul 16 00:14:43 gway01 kernel: Out of memory: Killed process 1380, UID 0, (yum-updatesd-he).
However, this entry occurred some time before I attempted my update task later that same morning.
I would like to be directly copied on any replies as I am a digest subscriber.
Sincerely,