[CentOS] yum update interruption recovery

[Louis Lagendijk]

On Wed, 2013-12-04 at 20:32 -0800, Hugh E Cruickshank wrote:
> From: Hugh E Cruickshank Sent: December 4, 2013 15:09
> > From: Frank Cox Sent: December 4, 2013 15:04
> > > On Wed, 4 Dec 2013 14:55:03 -0800 Hugh E Cruickshank wrote:
> > > > Tried that but it failed. 
> > > 
> > > Describe "failed".
> > 
> > That happened yesterday and I can not recall specifically what it
> > said. I am currently in the process of backing up the hard drive
> > before proceeding any further. I will see if I can get the error a
> > little later today.
> 
> Well I am unable to locate the error message as it does not appear to
> be logged. In the interim I have done a lot more research and I now
> suspect that I have two separate problems:
> 
> 1. Since the yum update did not complete then it never had a chance
>    to update the rpm database,
> 
> 2. We probably have one or more packages that have been install but
>    the predecessor has not be removed.
> 
> I have done the following:
> 
> a. Rebuilt the rpm database:
> 
>     rm -f /var/lib/rpm/__db*
>     rpm --rebuilddb
> 
> b. I then retried the yum update this aborted report conflicts in
>    systemtap packages.
> 
> c. I listed the installed systemtap packages:
> 
>    rpm -qa | grep systemtap | sort
> 
>    This revealed that there were two systemtap-devel packages
>    installed and I removed the newer one.
> 
> d. I then retried yum update and this appeared to work fine until it
>    got to:
> 
>    Cleanup  : 1:xorg-x11-drv-nouveau-1.0.1-3.el6.x86_64      286/513
> 
> At this point the system appears to be hung. I can not proceed any
> further this evening as I am working on this from home and I do not
> have physical access to the server to reboot it. In the morning I
> will reboot the server and try again but this time I am going to do
> a "yum clean all" to the rpm database rebuild.
> 
> Any thoughts or comments would be appreciated.
> 
Try package-cleanup --problems and see what it returns
package-cleanup --cleandupes  may helps with removal of duplicates

Louis