[SWLUG] URPMI woes

[Tony Williams]

On Fri, 2005-08-19 at 22:28 +0100, Glenn Booth wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> On 18/08/05, bascule <asura at theexcession.co.uk> wrote:
> > hmm, i totally disclaim the word expert but urpmi should work in 10.1, have
> > you checked that the other tools work, urpmq and urpmf?
> 
> Now you mention it, none of it seems to work, at least not properly.
> I tried to use RPMDrake to add an FTP mirror (warwick.ac.uk). It let
> me go through the motions, then gives me a download window and
> an hourglass that never goes away, titled "please wait, updating
> media". Closing the application results in a very Windows like
> "Window with title RPMDrake is not responding" message.
> 
> > presumably you are running it as root or sudo'ed? though that message is not
> > what you get when you run without privileges.
> 
> I was running it as root.
> 
> > ftr i have the .LOCK and .RPMLOCK present in /var/lib/urpmi/ even when the
> > database isn't locked are they the files you meant?
> 
> Yes. Some posts on linuxanswers led me to believe that sometimes those
> lock files get left behind when something goes wrong. I have deleted them,
> but it didn't seem to make a difference.
> 
> > since urpmi is a frontend for rpm perhaps you have lockfiles in /var/lib/rpm/?
> > look for file of the form __db*
> 
> I don't see any filenames like that, but I do have a file named RPMLOCK,
> which might be a culprit? I'll try deleting it, just for fun :-)
> 
> Thanks for the pointers.
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Glenn.
> 
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Hi

After a couple of years lurking , finally a question I think I can
answer.

Had the same problem on a server and found this fixed it all

In a terminal as root


killall urpmi urpmi.update urpme rpm urpmi.addmedia

rm -f /var/lib/urpmi/.LOCK /var/lib/rpm/RPMLOCK

rm -rf /var/lib/rpm/__db*

rpm --rebuilddb

If as I did you have removed all your sources, you will need to create
new ones, but if you haven't, it should work out of the box.

Hope this helps

Tony Williams
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