F8 64bit - Yum update OOPS

[Richard Shaw]

I did something I don't plan on doing again, which was to blindly trust the
update process. I did a yum check-update and saw the packages (something
like 54mb) and then did a yum -y update && reboot & (via ssh to my MythTV
box) so I could close the window and the process would complete. Next
morning the box was acting funny so I rebooted it to watch it load.

Services wpa_supplicant and nfs would not start so I started poking around
the log files and could not find anything out of the ordinary. No errors in
the yum log, in fact no entries for that day! I then looked in the
/var/cache/yum/packages (or something like that, I'm at work right now) and
saw MANY packages still there. I tried doing yum update again but it would
not run because it couldn't find the right version of some library (I forget
which now). I figured it was related to the packages that were downloaded
but not installed so I tried a rpm -Uvh * in that folder but it complained
of a unresolved dependency for htmlview. I found the package yum was having
trouble with and rpm installed it.

Here's where I made my first major mistake in trying to recover. I did a yum
clean all which wiped out those packages and immediately tried yum update.
This time it only found 4 packages to update which seemed to install fine.
Again tried to reboot and wpa_supplicant and nfs failed to start. I ended up
just disabling wpa_supplicant since this computer is hardwired only and the
erase dependencies were many. The nfs issue seemed to be related to an rpc
issue so I did a yum erase nfs and then yum install nfs and it was now
working.

Next issue, I use the xterm trick to use Xine to play DVD's in MythTV but it
wasn't working. As it turns out Xine was fine and it was now xterm which had
a library issue. Did a yum erase xterm/yum install xterm and now it's fine.

I'm not getting any errors or failed services anymore but I can only guess
what hidden gremlins are in the system now. Fortunately it's only used as a
MythTV/samba/nfs system and all those are working so I'll probably leave it
alone.

Any suggestions on figuring out which packages did not get updated or on how
to figure out what exactly happned?

Things I have tried: (Some mentioned above)
yum clean all (no help)
rpm -rebuilddb (no help)
Looked at every log in /var/log I thought relevant. There are no entires
from the original update process in yum.log. Does yum not write anything to
the log file until 100% complete?
Is there a way to check if all dependencies of already installed packages
are met?

Richard
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listman.redhat.com/archives/fedora-list/attachments/20080116/91b22851/attachment-0001.htm>