FC4: yum is sleeping indefinitely

[Juan Carlos Castro y Castro]

I am in the process of upgrading an FC4 machine. It was an "install 
everything", so there was 600+ packages to be updated.

Before doing a full yum update, I updated yum itself, the kernel, and 
rebooted. That was yesterday.

Since I had to leave the machine unattended at out hosting company, I 
did the following and went away:

nohup yum -y update &

Hours later, I see the following output file (it seems yum output less 
than it should into stdout)...

 vte                     i386       0.11.14-3.fc4    updates-released  460 k
 vte-devel               i386       0.11.14-3.fc4    updates-released  290 k
 w3c-libwww              i386       5.4.0-13.0.FC4.1  updates-released  
423 k
 w3c-libwww-apps         i386       5.4.0-13.0.FC4.1  updates-released   
30 k
 w3c-libwww-devel        i386       5.4.0-13.0.FC4.1  updates-released  
615 k
 wget                    i386       1.10.2-0.fc4     updates-released  572 k
 wireless-tools          i386       1:28-0.pre10.4   updates-released  103 k
 x86info                 i386       1:1.17-1.13      updates-released   30 k
 xdelta                  i386       1.1.3-17.fc4     updates-released  103 k
 xdelta-devel            i386       1.1.3-17.fc4     updates-released   98 k
 xen                     i386       2-20050823       updates-released  1.9 M
 xinitrc                 noarch     4.0.18.1-1       updates-released   28 k
 xorg-x11                i386       6.8.2-37.FC4.49.2  
updates-released   14 M
 xorg-x11-Mesa-libGL     i386       6.8.2-37.FC4.49.2  updates-released  
207 k
 xorg-x11-Mesa-libGLU    i386       6.8.2-37.FC4.49.2  updates-released  
278 k
 xorg-x11-Xdmx           i386       6.8.2-37.FC4.49.2  updates-released  
1.0 M
 xorg-x11-Xnest  Stopping sshd: [  OK  ]
Starting sshd: [  OK  ]
warning: /etc/sane.d/dll.conf created as /etc/sane.d/dll.conf.rpmnew
warning: /etc/rndc.key created as /etc/rndc.key.rpmnew
warning: /etc/named.conf saved as /etc/named.conf.rpmsave
warning: /var/named/localdomain.zone saved as 
/var/named/localdomain.zone.rpmsave
warning: /var/named/localhost.zone saved as 
/var/named/localhost.zone.rpmsave
warning: /var/named/named.broadcast saved as 
/var/named/named.broadcast.rpmsave
warning: /var/named/named.ca saved as /var/named/named.ca.rpmsave
warning: /var/named/named.ip6.local saved as 
/var/named/named.ip6.local.rpmsave
warning: /var/named/named.local saved as /var/named/named.local.rpmsave
warning: /var/named/named.zero saved as /var/named/named.zero.rpmsave
warning: /etc/ssh/sshd_config created as /etc/ssh/sshd_config.rpmnew
warning: /etc/vimrc created as /etc/vimrc.rpmnew

...and the yum proces is sleeping, wasting no CPU, and it seemingly is 
never going to finish. If I do a rpm -qa, it shows both versions of the 
updated packages, old and new. Pstree shows there's no processes spawned 
by the yum process.

Am I utterly and completely screwed? Should I abort yum and do it again? 
Do I have to make some kind of rebuild?