What to do when rpm verification fails

[Robin Laing]

Andras Simon wrote:
> 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
> 

Another option is to try is
   rpm -F --replacepkgs {package name}
This will re-install the rpm, even if it exists.  This should fix the 
issue of file permissions and possibly changed/corrupted files.

-- 
Robin Laing