yum going to sleep in the background?

[Paul]

I have a weird thing happening with yum since yesterday, or possibly
since the last update, which iirc included yum-updatesd.

When I do a "yum update", after I confirm that I want the updates to be
installed, yum goes to sleep in the background and does not perform the
updates.

USER       PID %CPU %MEM    VSZ   RSS TTY      STAT START   TIME COMMAND
root         1  0.0  0.0  10348   708 ?        Ss   Sep29   0:00 init [3]                                   
.
.
.
postfix  17210  0.0  0.0  42508  2088 ?        S    12:06   0:00 pickup -l -t fifo -u
root     17635  0.0  0.0  90120  3268 ?        Ss   12:07   0:00 sshd: jpb [priv] 
jpb      17644  0.0  0.0  90120  1772 ?        S    12:07   0:00 sshd: jpb at pts/0  
jpb      17645  0.0  0.0  66100  1500 pts/0    Ss   12:07   0:00 -bash
root     17659  0.0  0.0  66100  1508 pts/0    S    12:07   0:00 -bash
root     18851  0.8  1.3 288320 54212 pts/0    S+   12:43   0:02 /usr/bin/python /usr/bin/yum update
postfix  20707  0.0  0.0  42512  2116 ?        S    12:47   0:00 showq -t unix -u
root     21389  0.0  0.0  90120  3272 ?        Ss   12:48   0:00 sshd: jpb [priv] 
jpb      21412  0.0  0.0  90120  1764 ?        S    12:48   0:00 sshd: jpb at pts/1  
jpb      21413  0.0  0.0  66100  1492 pts/1    Ss   12:48   0:00 -bash
root     21427  0.0  0.0  66100  1500 pts/1    S    12:48   0:00 -bash
root     21868  0.0  0.0  65628   980 pts/1    R+   12:48   0:00 ps aux
postfix  30335  0.0  0.0  42504  2192 ?        S    Sep29   0:00 tlsmgr -l -t unix -u


I've never had this happen before, on any server, ever.

What's going on here? How do I get it to just do the update and be done with?