[CentOS] Centos7 broken after update

[Pete Biggs]

> 
> thanks for the suggestion. Indeed it seems I have a problem with
> glibc. Version is different between x86_64 and i386 and I have two
> glibc-common for x86_64. 
> Trying to remove the old one request removing half of the system
> packages because of the dependancies. The newest cannot be removed. 
> 
> 
> glibc-2.17-222.el7.i686 
> glibc-2.17-260.el7.x86_64 
> glibc-common-2.17-222.el7.x86_64 
> glibc-common-2.17-260.el7.x86_64 
> glibc-devel-2.17-260.el7.x86_64 
> glibc-headers-2.17-260.el7.x86_64 
> 
Yes, I battled with this exact same problem earlier in the week -
machine crashed halfway through the big update leaving things in a very
inconsistent state (lots of dupes, some library files zero length -
which was fun). Took me about 12 hours in total to sort out - I was
that close to just re-installing.

For glibc problem, can you do 

   yum erase glibc-2.17-222.el7.i686

there shouldn't be any serious dependencies on the .i686 version.  If
there are, just make a note and reinstall them later.

"package-cleanup --cleandupes" helped sort out some of the issues and
with the remaining few it was a case of manually removing the specific
versions and reinstalling what dependencies there were.

Once most of the issues were done, I then did a 'yum distrosync" (or
whatever it's called) to make sure packages were correct.

I still had problems with zero length files in some places, so I
installed yum-verify and ran 'yum verify' to show packages that were
inconsistent - there were lots. To get a list of them I did

  yum verify > yum.verify.out
  grep ' : ' yum.verify.out

The 'yum verify' takes a looong time, so be patient.

P.