[Gllug] Broken RPM Database

[Daniel P. Berrange]

On Sun, Jan 15, 2006 at 11:30:45AM +0000, Lee, Paul wrote:
> Hi
> Has anyone on the list successfully rebuilt their RPM database? I don't 
> mean rpm --rebuilddb. I've tried that and that was only partially 
> successful. This partly rebuilt a list of 71 packages (when the real 
> number will be over 300). rpm -Va reveals a list of failed dependencies.
> 
> I had just carried out an update of my Centos 3.6 using yum when I 
> discovered rpm was broken with `error: db4 error(-30989) from 
> dbcursor->c_get: DB_PAGE_NOTFOUND: Requested page not found` - I think 
> it might be this bug..

If you're lucky then you'll be able to recover this corruption by following
the dump/load procedure I outline here:

  http://people.redhat.com/berrange/notes/rpmrecovery.html

> I can think there are ways of manually recreating or initialising the 
> database again but I'm wondering if it might be just best to start from 
> scratch. The system works fine - it obviously can't be updated via RPM 
> at them moment!

If the DB is totally trashed, then look at the various /var/log/rpmpkgs
Hopefully one of the backups will have the complete list of RPMs. At
which point you can re-populate the RPM db by re-installing each RPM
using the --justdb  flag to tell it only to updat the database.

Then again a re-install might be simpler

> I've never really `lost` an RPM database before, --rebuilddb usually 
> doing its thing, but searching the Centos forums this would appear to be 
> a very rare event. It's strange that rebuilddb is only partially 
> rebuilding the list.

The --rebuilddb  flag is incredibly badly named - it basically does
nothing of the sort. It merely re-creates various de-normalizations
and indexes. 

Dan.
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