RE: [school-discuss] Help on packaging / configuration guides

[Jim Wildman <jim@rossberry.com>]

On Mon, 15 Mar 2004, Jeff Waddell wrote:

> Hello Steve and Michael,
> 
> Just a quick warning on yum and rpm in general.  Having just helped
> someone with a nasty little problem that takes a bit of research to
> figure out.  If you control-c (or kill -9) the yum (it's a perl script)
> or apparently rpm for that matter during an install (something I routine did with
> apt-get with debian), rpm will leave a semaphore file out there in it's
> /var/lib/rpm/something or other (I don't have a fedora or redhat box
> handy) and you will have to go delete it before you can get rpm or fedora
> to work again.  This may be old hat to many of you, however, it was news
> to the person I was helping (a very savvy sys admin with alot on his mind
> besides tracking down silly semaphore files).  The main kicker to this
> story is that NEITHER yum nor rpm gave any indication as to the problem...
> they just hung.

This is a known issue with rpm in general.  The latest releases of rpm
behave better in this regards, but not fool proof.  In general, don't
control-c an rpm operation.  Yum is a python based, automatic dependency
wrapper for rpm.  So the same applies there.

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jim Wildman, CISSP, RHCE                                jim@rossberry.com
http://www.rossberry.com