[BlueOnyx:14471] Re: Yum Update problems

[Michael Stauber]

Hi Dirk,

> if you have a fix for this issue please let the list know. 
> I have this issue on a lot of 5108R systems too.

Ok, this applies in case your YUM throws an error like this:

--> Finished Dependency Resolution
Error:  Multilib version problems found. This often means that the root
       cause is something else and multilib version checking is just
       pointing out that there is a problem. Eg.:

Just to clarify what "multilib" means:

Usually you only have one RPM of something installed. For example, of
your base-email-capstone should only be present once. Sometimes YUM gets
a bit confused and you end up with (allegedly) having the same RPM
installed twice, but in different version numbers. While this is not
nice, it's not really a big problem.

HOWEVER, there are also "multilib" RPMs and they're a bit special.

Of them you have (on an x86_64 box) two versions installed. One i686
version and one x86_64 version. THAT is perfectly OK for multilib RPMs.

Now let us take a look at the YUM report again. A bit further down in
that section it will tell you which multilib RPMs are affected.

Example:

Protected multilib versions: libgcc-4.4.7-4.el6.i686 !=
libgcc-4.4.7-3.el6.x86_64

So what do we have here:

libgcc-4.4.7-4.el6.i686
libgcc-4.4.7-3.el6.x86_64

We have the i686 version and the x86_64. So far, so good. But check
again: They're of different versions. One is 4.4.7-4 and the other one
is 4.4.7-3 instead.

They must be of the same version, or YUM throws this error.

So you check with "rpm -q libgcc" to see what matches and it DD's case
it returned this:

libgcc-4.4.7-4.el6.i686
libgcc-4.4.7-3.el6.i686
libgcc-4.4.7-3.el6.x86_64

So the i686 version was there twice. That made it easy to fix:

rpm -e --justdb libgcc-4.4.7-4.el6.i686

That removed the -4 from the RPM database without uninstalling any
files. And YUM was immediately happy with that.

The next problem on his box was this:

nss-softokn-freebl-3.14.3-9.el6.i686 !=
nss-softokn-freebl-3.14.3-3.el6_4.x86_64

There the fix was slightly more complicated. I ended up grabbing an RPM
from the Scientific Linux YUM repository directly and forced that aboard
via the RPM command, because his RPM database didn't have double entries
for this.

That kinda summarizes the two methods with which you can fix the
multilib RPM issues. One way or the other you must make sure that both
versions (i686 and x86_64) are of the same version and release. Then YUM
is happy again.

-- 
With best regards

Michael Stauber