RPM problems with RedHat8.0

At my work there have been several reports of RPM just locking and not
working. It was thought even that GRAB may be responsible for this. I finally
had the chance to hack on one of these systems, and it turns out that there
were some stale/corrupt database files that were the culprit. GRAB was only
involved because it was what was calling RPM to do the install.

If you have any problems with RPM 4.1 locking (seemingly) beyond repair, try 
to remove /var/lib/rpm/__db.* and try again. These files seem to be temporary
cache files and it will not harm your RPM database to remove them.

I am not sure what is causing this, and I personally have never seen the
problem on any of my systems. On the RPM mailing list it mentioned that
similar problems were caused by killing RPM in the middle of a job. But the 
admins were telling me that they only killed the command after it hung for 10+ 
minutes. Anyway, after removing these stale files, RPM was able to continue 
normally.

Interesting side-note:

[gmkurtzer@spike ~]$ grep __db /etc/rc.sysinit
rm -f /var/lib/rpm/__db*

So I guess this is one area that RedHat has taken after Windows. Rebooting
_should_ fix this problem! That just pains me to say. Hey Jeff, if you are
listening, maybe this command should just be prefixed in /usr/lib/rpm/rpmd
rebuilddb sequence?

Greg
-- 
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