Rebuilding the RPM Database

Be very careful messing with your RPM database. You can cause serious system failure if you mess up your RPM packages. One trick that works for us is to rebuild the RPM database.

root@www root]# cd /var/lib/rpm/
[root@www rpm]# ls
Basenames __db.003 Installtid Provideversion Sha1header
Conflictname Dirnames Name Pubkeys Sigmd5
__db.001 Filemd5s Packages Requirename Triggername
__db.002 Group Providename Requireversion
[root@www rpm]# rm __db*
rm: remove regular file `__db.001'? y
rm: remove regular file `__db.002'? y
rm: remove regular file `__db.003'? y
[root@www rpm]# rpm --rebuilddb
[root@www rpm]#

A corrupted RPM database can cause problems with up2date locking up.