[BlueOnyx:21666] Aborted yum update problems on 5209R

[Ernie]

I just broke yum updates on two servers.


Normally I let the yum updates run from the GUI, but when I tried to run one
on a 5209R server that hadn't been updated for several weeks, my browser
lost connection with the server, which is odd as I am on the same lan.

So I decided to telnet because I didn't have an ssh client handy and run the
update by hand which I have done many times in the past.

When I did:

 yum clean all
 yum -y update

I got something like 64 duplicate package errors.
No matter what I tried I couldn't get the yum update to complete, I even
tried a yum history undo on the last record.

Being curious, I then telnet into another test 5209R server which hasn't
been updated for several months, and tried

 yum clean all
 yum -y update


All was proceeding as expected until the inetd process was restarted which
kicked me out of the server, thus killing the yum -y update process.

When I logged back in, it two was giving me a raft of duplicate package
errors, and I couldn't proceed.

** Found 912 pre-existing rpmdb problem(s)

Can anyone suggest how I can recover from this?


- Ernie.