An RPM Database Fix

Had a remarkably trouble-free time upgrading from RedHat 6.2 (don't ask) to Fedora Core 2. Well, if you must know, it's a development server that hasn't been broken. After the upgrade, Oracle and ColdFusion still worked. There was one thing that could be a niggle.

# rpm -qa
error: cannot open Packages database in /var/lib/rpm
no packages

In fact, any attempt to use rpm resulted in the same message. Strange thing was that looking at the underlying database everything looked fine.

# /usr/lib/rpm/rpmdb_verify /var/lib/rpm/Packages
# echo $?
0
#

After some flailing around, I decided to try seeing what was really happening. This is a habit I picked up from SnoopDOS. On Linux, the equivalent command is strace

# strace rpm -qa 2>&1| less
execve("/bin/rpm", ["rpm", "-qa"], [/* 24 vars */]) = 0
[... lots of splurging gobbledygook here ... ]
[... not having a lot to go on, I searched for instances of "rpm" ... ]
[... many lines later ...]
open("/etc/rpm/macros.db1.rpmorig", O_RDONLY|O_LARGEFILE) = 3

Ok, I don't know all that much about rpm but it should surely not be reading files with ".rpmorig" tagged onto the name. Feeling brave, I decided to try a fairly radical fix.

# cd /etc/rpm
# mkdir STUFF
# mv macros* STUFF/
# rpm -qa

... and it worked. It looks like the one line in macros.db1.rpmorig was the culprit:

%_dbapi         1

It seems that this was causing rpm to try accessing the database using an obsolete API. Oh well, now it's noted for future reference.