On Wed, Jun 25, 2008 at 2:27 PM, Ian Blackwell <ian at ikel.id.au> wrote: > 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. > > 1. 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 ...snip... The best way to remove duplicate package is using rpm itself and the --justdb switch. This will only remote entries inside the RPM database and not on the filesytem itself. If you remove the newest version of the duplicate packages you can run the yum update again and it will reinstall the newer versions and all should be good. Regards, Tim -- Tim Verhoeven - tim.verhoeven.be at gmail.com - 0479 / 88 11 83 Hoping the problem magically goes away by ignoring it is the "microsoft approach to programming" and should never be allowed. (Linus Torvalds)