On Mon, 2002-12-30 at 18:15, I wrote:
> I know this has come up before, but I can't seem to find
> the solution in the archives (other than re-installing).
>
> My RPM database seems to have gotten corrupted.
> If I do: rpm -qa
>
> it hangs after listing most (but not all) of my installed packages.
>
> I tried to do: rpm --rebuilddb
>
> but this seems to go into an infinite loop. It will begin
> rebuilding in the /var/lib directory but after some time the
> load average jumps up one unit. After some more time it jumps
> up another unit (to three) and the files in the re-build directory
> just keep getting overwritten.
<snip>
Thanks to Brian Schroeder, Jack and Melissa McSwain, and
James Sparenberg for your suggestions and moral support.
(I hope I didn't miss anyone!)
It turns out that I was able to fix the problem w/o a major
hassle. By comparing the files /var/log/rpmpkgs* (which
are kindly generated each week by /etc/cron.daily and archived
weekly by the system, I discovered (and forgot) that I had installed
an .rpm on Friday night. It was a very old .rpm built by an old
version of rpm (3.0.4?) in Feb. of 2001. This turns out to have
corrupted my DB. rpm -e fixed the problem and allowed me to
do rpm --rebuilddb sucessfully.
Again, thanks for your help. I've bookmarked the links you sent.
Dean S. Messing
Display Algorithms & Visual Optimization Lab
Information Systems Technologies Dept.
Sharp Laboratories of America
Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft?
Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
