« Experiments with Crowds | Main | The Summer Spike In Gas Prices »

September 21, 2004

For Computer Geeks Only

I've had a problem with my computer at work that has been vexing me for quite a while. On my Redhat-based Linux machine in my office, I have been intermittently unable to install software for months using Redhat's RPM package-management software. Rebooting occasionally helped, so I wasn't totally paralyzed. It turns out that this is a problem that has confronted many others, as well. Interestingly, I never started running into this problem until a few months ago, and I've been using variants of Redhat for years.

The short solution is this:

lsof /var/lib/rpm/Packages  # see which processes are currently using the RPM Package database
kill -9 <pid>               # kill those processes
rm -f /var/lib/rpm/__db*    # delete any open/corrupt databases
rpm -vv --rebuilddb         # rebuild the database in verbose mode

Posted by Dean at September 21, 2004 11:53 AM

Trackback Pings

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.christakos.com/cgi-bin/mt-tb.cgi/34