(no subject)

[two_pi_r]

So, I hate RPM.

This time, the database on pihost got wedged in such a way that anything dealing with it, even a query, would jam up in a loop of select() syscalls and stare. the standard rpm --rebuilddb didn't work, because it jammed up too. I started wandering the filesystem for something that could possibly help, after taking a backup of /var/lib/rpm. I found what I hoped was something useful in /usr/lib/rpm/.. They looked to be the BerkDB utils renamed:

[root@pihost] /usr/lib/rpm # ls rpmdb*
rpmdb_archive rpmdb_deadlock rpmdb_load rpmdb_printlog rpmdb_stat rpmdb_upgrade
rpmdb_checkpoint rpmdb_dump rpmdb_loadcvt rpmdb_recover rpmdb_svc rpmdb_verify
[root@pihost] /usr/lib/rpm # ./rpmdb_recover -h
./rpmdb_recover: option requires an argument -- h
usage: db_recover [-ceVv] [-h home] [-P password] [-t [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.SS]]
[root@pihost] /usr/lib/rpm # ./rpmdb_recover -v -h /var/lib/rpm
[root@pihost] /usr/lib/rpm # rpm -aq | head -n3
eject-2.0.12-4
newt-0.50.35-1
gawk-3.1.0-4

So, while I got shit fixed, I still hate RPM. I ran a database rebuild after that, too, just to be on the safe side.