I had a server run out of space recently, to the point that it couldn’t complete the yum update. This server ended up corrupting a yum packages database.
Here’s how corrupted YUM database looks
Correctly called rpmdb, packaged database used by YUM looks like this when it can’t be opened:
root@s3:/ # yum update
error: db5 error(11) from dbenv->open: Resource temporarily unavailable
error: cannot open Packages index using db5 - Resource temporarily unavailable (11)
error: cannot open Packages database in /var/lib/rpm
CRITICAL:yum.main:
Error: rpmdb open failed
Rebuilding RPM DB
The fix is to rebuild the RPM database, like this:
root@s3:/ # rpm --rebuilddb
and just to try things, do the same yum update – it should work now:
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