[CentOS] Yum update corrupted something badly - can only get access through SSH terminal or Webmin

Wed Apr 22 21:13:17 UTC 2009
Craig White <craigwhite at azapple.com>

On Wed, 2009-04-22 at 15:37 -0500, Les Mikesell wrote:
> Craig White wrote:
> > On Wed, 2009-04-22 at 15:05 -0500, Les Mikesell wrote:
> > 
> >> Once yum is basically working you might be able to
> >> yum install yum-utils
> >> and
> >> yum-complete-transaction
> >> to pick up where you left off.  I had to do this on one box where the 
> >> update process kicked me off and died with a bunch of duplicate packages 
> >> still in the rpm database.
> > ----
> > me too...punished for not using screen to update.
> 
> I sort-of expected yum to be smart enough to trap sighup's during 
> transactions. And I think the connection broke because the process 
> underneath died - so screen would probably have croaked too.
> 
> > yum-complete-transaction actually required a leap of faith because there
> > were hundreds of packages it wanted to remove  ;-)
> 
> Same here... I did do a sanity check with rpm -q package for some of 
> them to see that two versions were actually there (or rpm thought there 
> were).
----
well interesting...so it probably wouldn't have mattered if I had used
screen. This only happened on one of the servers that I updated and it
is possible that I didn't update glibc first...it was one of the last
systems I updated so I may have been too cavalier about the process. The
first few I carefully updated glibc first, then yum and then finally the
rest.

And yes, when yum-complete-transaction is telling you it is removing
like 500 packages, you do a double and triple take, start checking the
packages it intends to remove to make certain that it will leave a new
version but still, I wasn't going to check everything so I eventually
had to make the leap.

While the updates don't always go perfectly, especially when one gets
lackadaisical, the yum-tools seem to clean up behind you pretty well.

Craig


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