[26181] in Athena Bugs
Re: linux 9.3.11 - 9.3.16: update
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Greg Hudson)
Sun Nov 14 22:05:25 2004
From: Greg Hudson <ghudson@mit.edu>
To: Camilla R Fox <cfox@mit.edu>
In-Reply-To: <200411132230.iADMU8Sx021053@red-herring.mit.edu>
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Date: Sun, 14 Nov 2004 22:04:34 -0500
cc: bugs@mit.edu
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I asked Camilla for access to red-herring so that I could attempt to
repair it.
I am left with three mysteries: I don't know why the update hung, I
don't know why the second run of rpmupdate deleted many of the files
associated with the RPMs it removed old versions of (for instance, 76 of
the 275 files in libstdc++-devel are missing), and I don't know why the
un-removed RPM files on the system didn't appear to match the ones from
rpm-4.2.3-10.i386.rpm. (The other RPMs whose old versions were removed
by the second rpmupdate run did not appear to have mismatches, based on
a spot check of libstdc++-devel and qt as well as a run of rpm -Va.)
The RPM database, however, was fine. The error message "cannot open
Packages database in /var/lib/rpm" was completely bogus; strace revealed
that rpm wasn't looking in /var/lib/rpm at all, and the real problem was
a lack of supporting data files, not the database. I was able to get
rpm functioning again with:
cd /
rpm2cpio /path/to/rpm-4.2.3-10.i386.rpm | cpio -id
rpm -Uvh --replacepkgs /path/to/rpm-4.2.3-10.i386.rpm
I noted that many of the rpm-related files on the system did not
(previously) match rpm-4.2.3-10.i386.rpm; I don't know why that is.
I saved aside some information from the system, but I don't have much
hope for figuring out what went wrong.
I recommend reinstalling the RPMs mentioned in /var/athena/update.log,
using rpm -Uvh --replacepkgs.
