rpm upgrades segfaulting FC1

Panu Matilainen pmatilai at welho.com
Wed May 5 06:09:37 UTC 2004


On Tue, 4 May 2004, Brian Hankins wrote:

> I am having some trouble with rpm upgrades, while installing new 
> packages works fine. This is what I see when running this:
> # rpm -Uvh package.rpm
> Segfault
> 
> There is a backstory to this actually. One day I was running the 
> upgrades as normal through the graphical up2date tool, and I upgraded 
> something like 6 packages at once. This was about a month and a half ago 
> when openssl needed an update. When I rebooted, all kinds of stuff began 
> segfaulting after some research and straces we ended up forcing a 
> reinstall of the openssl package(just trying to ssh into another machine 
> was segfaulting as well). After that everything seemed to be working 
> well, except for rpm which segfaults everytime I  try to upgrade a 
> package, which is hindering me from updating the system. I had something 
> like this happen in an older version of redhat so I used:
> # rpm --rebuilddb
> 
> I was still running into the same issue, and I went to deleted the db files:
> # rm /var/lib/rpm/__db*
> 
> The problem still happens, so I grabbed the rpm of rpm from the install 
> cd and upgraded it with: "rpm -Uvh --force" which ends up displaying the 
> status hashes like its installing, but segfaults after that point. I 
> could not find anything beneficial in my investigation in the logs or 
> and strace of running rpm, granted I am not an expert on it. I would 
> appreciate any suggestions, or help on a fix or workaround, or what else 
> I need to look for. Thanks alot.

The rpm binary is quite unlikely to be corrupt, reinstalling package 
doesn't typically "fix it" on Linux :)

There's probably something corrupt in the rpmdb, if --rebuilddb doesn't 
cure it then you can try the alternative method:

Take a backup:
# cd /var/lib
# tar czvf /tmp/rpmdb.tar.gz rpm

Do a basic verify of the packages db:
# cd /var/lib/rpm
# /usr/lib/rpm/rpmdb_verify Packages 

Repair it:
# mv Packages Packages-ORIG
# /usr/lib/rpm/rpmdb_dump Packages-ORIG | /usr/lib/rpm/rpmdb_load Packages

See if it worked:
# rpm -qa

If that works ok then rebuild indices:
# rpm --rebuilddb
..and you should be ready to go. If it still segfaults file a bug to 
bugzilla.

	- Panu -





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