Re: [owl-users] RPM Issue

Hi Simon,

On Wed, Mar 24, 2010 at 03:53:08PM +0000, Simon Baker wrote:
> I've hit upon a strange new issue, and I'm struggling to pin down the cause.

Apparently, our switch from LinuxThreads to NPTL triggered an RPM bug to
show up.  In my experience, the issue only shows up once - after
upgrading an existing system to our current packages.  It does not show
up on further buildworld/installworld runs (rebuilding and reinstalling
our current versions).  At least I was not able to deliberately trigger
it on a specific fast machine where I did the build/install many times
in a row.

> rpmdb: unable to join the environment
> error: db4 error(11) from dbenv->open: Resource temporarily unavailable
> error: cannot open Packages index

When I had this error on two systems that had just been upgraded to our
latest packages, rm'ing /var/lib/rpm/__db.00? helped to get rid of it,
and the error did not show up again.

You mention that this workaround somehow did not help you.  This is news
to me.  Maybe you still had an rpm process running when you rm'ed the
files?  In that state, it could need to be SIGKILL'ed.  Just a guess.

Also, did you start your upgrades by installing our new binary packages
or did you do your own rebuilds from source right away?  In the latter
case, you might have reached an intermediary state that we did not see
in our testing.

Of course, we're not happy about this unresolved issue, but it is
inconvenient to trigger at will and difficult to investigate.

Thanks,

Alexander