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Hi. For the last few days, I have been unable to update on one machine. Initially I thought it was just the GUI updater that was affected, but I have found that even urpmi --auto-update no longer works.
Using --debug, all seems to be fine up to the point where it opens the rpm db. It then just stops - no errors.

opening rpmdb (root=, write=)
[wait forever - or at least long enough for me to give up!]

A similar problem occurs if I try to edit media.

The machine did run out of space on / a week or so ago, and /var does not have its own partition so this may be related, although there is now space available again.
I have (unwisely?) tried an rpm --rebuilddb and this has not helped.

Any ideas?

mailedfist wrote:I have (unwisely?) tried an rpm --rebuilddb and this has not helped.

Did you check whether there were any lock files?

Also see http://rpm.org/user_doc/db_recovery.html

Many thanks. Whilst I don't seem to have the rpmdb_dump, stat, or verify commands (I had been hoping to use verify when I started looking at the issue) what I had not thought to do was the

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lsof | grep /var/lib/rpm

This showed that I did still have locks due to a process I'd missed. Killing the process then allowed rpm -qa to execute without freezing, and all now seems to be well.

I'm a intrigued as to why these various commands were all freezing rather than doing the usual reporting that the rpm db was locked.

mailedfist wrote:Whilst I don't seem to have the rpmdb_dump, stat, or verify commands (I had been hoping to use verify when I started looking at the issue)

Keep in mind that those binaries are located below /usr/lib/rpm and hence are not in your $PATH by default, but I don't have an mga system at hands to check.
They might have also been relocated somewhere else maybe.