RPM Hangs

A friend asked for a copy of RedHat 9. XCDRoast wasn’t installed on my system, so I ran apt-get install xcdroast. It downloaded the package, ran RPM, then froze. Ctrl-C wouldn’t stop it. I ended up closing the command line window. Then this morning, I tried to run up2date and it just sat there. I also noticed my tripwire report wasn’t in my inbox. A ps aux | grep rpm showed a few stuck rpm processes (including last night’s install of xcdroast). I found Bugzilla reference 73097 about problem and tried the steps in comment #3:

  • run kill -9 on the affected rpm processes

  • rm -f /var/lib/rpm/__db*

  • rpm --rebuilddb

Then I got this message from rpm --rebuilddb:

error: db4 error(16) from dbenv->remove: Device or resource busy. This led me to Bugzilla reference 83281, which says, don’t worry about it. Sure enough, all seems fine now.