[CLUE-Tech] Re: rpm command hangs

[Nate Duehr]

Jason S. Friedman wrote:

> Thanks for confirming.  I ran this on my "development" box so no real harm done.  A strange thing happened after this.  I woke up this morning and it was still hung.  I killed it and nothing seems to be hurting as a result, on that development box.  But, my "production" box had died sometime in the night.  No response to the keyboard.  I had to reboot.  Never experienced that before.
> 
> 
>>I feel your pain - with the last 3 Red Hat distros I have tried, I have 
>>yet to successfully upgrade glibc.  The RPM command always dies or errors 
>>out when I try, and I have to then rebuild the show system because all the 
>>programs quit working and I'm not smart enough to get around it.  I just 
>>suggest staying away from the glibc upgrades :)

I have run into this a number of times on "production" machines at work 
and there are a couple of ways to fix it.  The easiest being to kill off 
any/all RPM related processes and then run rpm --rebuilddb to get the db 
files back in a good state and then install things one at a time instead 
of in a big chunk.  The hang almost always comes during installation of 
a whole bunch of RPM's.

It's a known bug and has been in RedHat's bugzilla database since RH 8 
beta, but it's not fixed.

There are other ways given to fix it that include blowing away the db 
files by hand, and then doing the --rebuilddb, but I never saw any 
advantage to that.

I had some e-mail chats with one of the guys who handles RPM stuff at 
RedHat and he sent me information on how to get around it, but I am a 
bit disappointed that they didn't just fix the issue.  It makes upgrades 
on boxes that shouldn't be rebooted in a production environment a lot 
more risky... especially if you're trying to automate them.  Having RPM 
hang like that in the middle of a 20-30 machine upgrade isn't acceptable 
software behaviour for the core package manager of the OS.

Oh well, hopefully that's more confirmation for ya that it's borked. 
None of the other RPM-based distros I play with here at home have ever 
exhibited the problem, and of course, .deb based distros don't either... 
if you want to simply avoid it altogether.  ;-)

Nate