From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:0.9.8) Gecko/20020205 Description of problem: Some kind of database corruption happened after a couple of rpm -Us. rpm -q appears to work. rpm -q -a works, rpm -q -l -vv works, but any install/update/remove now reports the following error: rpmdb: Suspiciously high nelem of 4294967295 on page 0 error: db4 error(-30979) from db->verify: DB_VERIFY_BAD: Database verification failed The error is usually reported at the end of the install/removal, and it looks like the package install/remove actually went through, except for this error. However it does not appear to be possible to fix the corruption: rpm --rebuilddb now does some work, for a while, then strace shows it spinning in an infinite mmap/munmap loop. There is no apparent way to recover the database completely. How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Download http://www.email-scan.com/rpm.bad.tar.gz (8MB) into /var/lib/rpm 2. Run rpm --rebuilddb Actual Results: rpm runs for a while, rebuilds about half the packages, then starts spinning in an infinite loop. Expected Results: The RPM database should be rebuilt as much as possible.
This isn't exactly damaged "beyond all repair" There's a Berkeley db patch that was not included in db-4.0.14, now reapplied in rpm-4.0.4 final. Try doing rm /var/lib/rpm/__db* rpm --rebuilddb If that doesn't fix your problem, attach a pointer (bugzilla attachments won't work) to a tarball of your database cd /var/lib tar czvf /tmp/rpmdb-60152.tar.gz rpm and I'll take a look.
I already tried rebuilddb after manually dropping __db files. It doesn't work. http://www.email-scan.com/rpm.bad.tar.gz (8MB)
Your database rebuilds fine here. Add -vv and watch the progress. Yes, there's a *lot* of entries in the dev package, patience will out.