What to do when rpm verification fails

[Andras Simon]

On 7/7/06, Scott R. Godin <scott.g at mhg2.com> wrote:

>
> this is *exactly* the sort of thing I saw the last time my system went
> screwy.
>
> The first thing you have to worry about is filesystem corruption. boot
> from the install cd, and enter the linux rescue mode, and do not mount
> the drives when prompted.
>
> fsck each of your partitions manually, possibly more than once if you
> encounter a drive with many problems.

Good idea! I'll do this.

>
> Once you are able to get through that cleanly, then reboot the system
> normally
>
> identifying the corrupted packages is your next step, again with
>     rpm -Va > rpmverify.txt 2>&1
>
> then step through the packages in question *carefully*
>
> things like glibc you don't want to first remove and then install :-)
>
> use ( yumdownloader <packagename> ) to grab the current package one at a
> time, and use ( rpm -ivh --force packagename*rpm ) to re-install it in
> place.

I did rpm -U --force xyz.rpm from the install dvd (thinking that I'd
better be offline with a possibly hacked /usr/bin/passwd), until the
rpm -Va list shrinked to an acceptable size (which doesn't mean a
thing of course). Curiously, it took a few rounds: new items were
cropping up for a while.

> it may be a wise idea, once you have finished this process, to use
> tune2fs to set up automatic filesystem checks at boot time periodically.
> (I myself set up a 25 remount or 3 weeks option set on mine though
> that's a tad on the paranoid side.. however faced with the above, you
> might think the same way as me -- catch it early. )
>
> I used
>     tune2fs -c 25 -i 3w /dev/sda3
> to make these settings on my / partition. tune2fs -l will list the
> current settings for you. the manpage for tune2fs is particularly
> enlightening in its description of the -c switch, and I recommend
> reading it.

Thanks for the suggestion, I'll read up on tune2fs!

> to catch further filesystem stuff like this, sooner, you might consider
> running rpm -Va once a week in a cron job.

Actually, I noticed all this by diffing the output of rpm -Va with the
one I got two days ago.

Andras