yum updates corrupting rpmdb

[Craig White]

On Sat, 2007-12-15 at 23:54 -0500, Joe Smith wrote:
> Craig White wrote:
> > ...
> >> Is there some "run recovery" that's different than --rebuilddb?
> > ----
> > no but perhaps your /dev/sdb7 has some corruption itself.
> > 
> > You might try something like 'shutdown now -Fr' to force an fsck on
> > reboot
> 
> Thanks for the suggestion, but no, it checks clean. Badblocks comes up 
> clean also.
> 
> I tried dropping to single user to run fsck, but couldn't unmount /var. 
> There were no open files on it, so maybe it's connected to whatever was 
> preventing yum from being killed; maybe a database block was locked or 
> something, I don't know.
> 
> It could be last time, because I rebuilt the database before I rebooted, 
> there was still this strange problem with the partition, so maybe the 
> database still was not clean.
> 
> So, I rebooted to single-user; rpm --rebuilddb; yum clean all
> 
> Now rpm is working again, but yum reports no updates are available, even 
> though there are packages announced for updates that should apply to me:
> 
> # yum list firefox gnome-python2, ...
> Installed Packages
> autofs.i386          1:5.0.2-17             installed
> firefox.i386         2.0.0.10-2.fc8         installed
> gnome-python2.i386   2.20.0-1.fc8           installed
> lftp.i386            3.5.14-2.fc8           installed
> libshout.i386        2.2.2-1.fc6            installed
> libsoup.i386         2.2.103-1.fc8          installed
> nspluginwrapper.i386 0.9.91.5-12.fc8        installed
> system-config-firewall.noarch  1.0.11-1.fc8 installed
> 
> Yet, todays update annoucements list:
> 
> [SECURITY] Fedora 8 Update: autofs-5.0.2-20  updates
> Fedora 8 Update: firefox-2.0.0.10-3.fc8  updates
> Fedora 8 Update: gnome-python2-2.20.1-1.fc8  updates
> Fedora 8 Update: lftp-3.5.14-3.fc8  updates
> Fedora 8 Update: libshout-2.2.2-2.fc8  updates
> Fedora 8 Update: libsoup-2.2.104-1.fc8  updates
> Fedora 8 Update: nspluginwrapper-0.9.91.5-13.fc8  updates
> Fedora 8 Update: system-config-firewall-1.0.12-2.fc8  updates
> 
> So it looks like all these packages should be upgraded, but yum says no.
> 
> I remember at least a few of those being in the update list before yum 
> went berserk, so something sure looks off-track here.
> 
> What could cause that? Maybe the updates have not reached the mirrors 
> yet? Surely yum doesn't depend on that to determine what upgrades are 
> available.
> 
> Hmm... out of desperation, I ran another "yum clean all" and now it's 
> picking up all those updates. So I wasn't crazy--yum was just fouled up 
> again.
> 
> Suggestions welcome--let's see if I can actually do the updates this 
> time. Two down, five left.
----
did you want some cheese with that whine?

man yum.conf

metadata_expire
Time  (in  seconds) after which the metadata will expire. So that if the
current metadata downloaded is less than this many seconds old then yum
will not update the metadata against the repository.  If you find that
yum is not downloading information on updates as often as you would like
lower the value of this option.

Craig