We’ve had a few users report that yum is frozen on their VPS’s. Usually ones running cPanel and I figured it was worth a quick post about how to solve it. The problem is usually the rpm database has become corrupt. It’s quite easy to fix all you need to do is run a few commands and it should hopefully fix everything up.
- Kill off any processes currently using RPM. You most likely will have a few as yum is frozen and if you had anything else attempt to use yum or rpm it would be frozen as well. So run the following command:
lsof | grep /var/lib/rpm
This will give you a list of processes that you need to kill. Kill each with the following command:
kill -9 processid
Replacing processid with the id of the process on the list
- The next step is to remove the temporary rpm database files. You can do this with the following command:
rm -fv /var/lib/rpm/__*
- Finally you need to rebuild the rpm database and that can be done with the following command:
rpm –rebuilddb -v -v
It’s that easy and now everything should work properly again. I hope this helps some people out with issues with yum or rpm.