rpmdb error help needed

[Erwin Rol]

On Tue, 2006-10-10 at 16:18 -0400, Horst H. von Brand wrote:
> Erwin Rol <mailinglists at erwinrol.com> wrote:

> I've got both a dual-core i686 notebook and a dual-core x86_64 desktop, and
> I've /never/ seen anything like this... The following are the things I
> check first when seeing aberrant behaviour:

I have never seen the error on my x86_64 AMD single cpu/core machine,
but a lot on my Dell Latitude D620.

> Have you checked the hardware (memtest, overheating due to bad fan, ...)?

Never seen any other error ever, and i do a lot of C++ compiling on the
machine, which most of the time will trigger memory and heat related
errors. 

> Bad electric power (yes, some machines here used to go crazy due to voltage
> fluctuations)? Bad/undersized power supply?

Unlikely since its a laptop and not a desktop. (and No it does not have
a Sony battery ;-)

> Have you checked the relevant packages (at least yum, rpm, glibc,
> fileutils, etc; "rpm -q --requires ..." should point you in the right
> direction)? "rpm -V ..." is your friend.

All the latest rawhide versions. 

> /var (or other filesystems) filled up? (Yes, rpm (at least used to) go nuts
> and spew strange messages)

Nope lots of Gigs space left.

> Anybody frobbing disk parameters "for performance"?! That leads to
> (regrettably mostly silent) filesystem corruption... Overclocking?

Have not "tuned" anything, certainly not any overclocking.  

I always had the felling it was a deadlock of some kind that caused the
problem. It seemed that /etc/cron.daily/rpm would hang, and that causing
a yum update to get a corrupted rpm DB. 

Maybe its just a messed up rawhide install I will do a complete clean
install when FC6 is ready and see if the problem goes away. 

- Erwin