rpm hangs for root

[Andras Simon]

On 11/19/06, Tony Nelson <tonynelson at georgeanelson.com> wrote:
> At 4:28 PM +0100 11/19/06, Andras Simon wrote:
> >On a fully updated FC5 (as of say, 2 days ago), when started as root,
> >rpm hangs even for simple queries. The last few things it does
> >(according to strace) are:
> >
> >open("/var/lib/rpm/Name", O_RDONLY|O_LARGEFILE) = 4
> >fcntl64(4, F_SETFD, FD_CLOEXEC)         = 0
> >fstat64(4, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0644, st_size=40960, ...}) = 0
> >futex(0xb7d32900, FUTEX_WAIT, 2, NULL
> >
> >This doesn't happen if I start rpm as a normal user (and has never
> >happened before for root). I see no selinux related messages in the
> >logs.
> >
> >Any ideas?
>
> rpm --verifydb   # an undocumented option
>
> (or "rpm -vv --verifydb" for verbose output)
>
> If there is a problem (and I think there is), but the Packages file is OK,
> "rpm --rebuilddb" (as root, I think).

I didn't know about the --verifydb option, so, after googling a bit, I
just did an rpm --rebuilddb (after making a backup of the db), and it
solved the problem. But next time I'll try the -verifydb bit. (I'm too
lazy to restore the old db now just to see what rpm --verifydb says.)
Thanks for the suggestion!

Andras