Welcome to my world

We had a party last night, nothing huge just some friends over for a Chinese. Me and another of our friends we given the truly exciting job of going to Tescos to buy drinks.

So off we trot to Tesco. We get to the till with our 3 items, a bottle of Sprite, a bottle of coke and some alcohol and as the girl on the till is about 12 she needs to shout at the top of her lungs “ALLLCCAAAAHOOOLLLLL”. Supervisor walks over and asks us for ID. Now I’m nearly 30 and no-one’s asked me for ID in the last 10 year so I’m happy. However the friend I’m with (who’s 20) doesn’t have any ID.

“Sorry I can’t sell this to you?” says the Supervisor

“Why not?” I ask

“Cos you might be buying it for a minor” she indicates to my 20 year old friend stood next to me.

“So let me get this right, I’m not allowed to buy alcohol if I’m accompanied by someone who can’t prove they’re over 18 cos I might walk out the shop and give it to the next ASBO infested greasy teen I meet?”

“Yep”

“Right, I’m off to Morrisons!”

What makes this story more ridiculous is that we weren’t buying vodka or alchopops. No, we were buy a bottle of White Zinfandel! Yes the yobs round our way must get hammered each night on a couple bottle of rosé.

Friend and colleagues laughing at you? Feel inferior? Need a really big machine?? Of course you do!
http://thrillingwonder.blogspot.com/2006/11/biggest-and-hungriest-machines.html

Max Spevack (Fedora Project Leader) yesterday announced some interesting stats about FC6. According to Max, since its release about 3 weeks ago, 300,000 unique IP addresses have checked for any updates to FC6. Wow! That’s at least 12,500 new installs per day!! Kinda pisses on DistroWatch’s stats! Oh and on a personal note… Take that Ubuntu boys!

Detailed stats are at: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/ZodStats and you can read the whole release on fedora-announce-list.

Take a look at this!

[root@dyn89 yum]# pwd
/var/cache/yum
[root@dyn89 yum]# du -sh *
1.8M atrpms
6.1M core
5.3M development
11M extras
36K flash
84K jpackage-fedora
2.2M jpackage-generic
192K jpackage-generic-nonfree
848K livna
2.8M updates
176K updates-sourceThat’s 30Mb of crappy yum cache

Now take a look at this:

[root@dyn89 cache]# yum clean all
Loading "installonlyn" plugin
Cleaning up Everything
[root@dyn89 cache]# du -sh * 1.8M atrpms
12K core
5.3M development
12K extras
12K flash
84K jpackage-fedora
2.2M jpackage-generic
192K jpackage-generic-nonfree
12K livna
12K updates
176K updates-source9.6M much healthier

It nice to see something are just buried and not forgotten, Like corrupt RPM databases. A few years ago this was a common problem (common to me anyway!). The problem occurs either when two rpm process try and write to the rpm database in /var/lib/rpm or an impatient operator (like me) hits ctrl-c too many times.

When this happens, you rpm process (e.g. the rpm command or yum) would just hang. So why am I talking about this if the problem was fixed ages ago? Well it seem with the new funky yum-updatesd that’s included with FC6 is causing some problems.
You can see if your effected but running this command:

rpm -qa

If you get no output then you’ve screwed your databases. Here’s how to fix it.

1. Firstly su or sudo in to root
   su -
2. Clear your rpm caches
   rm -v /var/lib/rpm/__*
3. Now run the rebuild command
   rpm -vv --rebuilddb

You now gets some lovely healthy output showing you everything ok. It should look something like this:

D: adding 11 entries to Filemd5s index.
D: read h# 770 Header V3 DSA signature: OK, key ID 4f2a6fd2
D: +++ h# 1084 Header V3 DSA signature: OK, key ID 4f2a6fd2
D: adding "gimp-print-utils" to Name index.
D: adding 2 entries to Basenames index.
D: adding "Applications/Publishing" to Group index.
D: adding 12 entries to Requirename index.
D: adding "gimp-print-utils" to Providename index.
D: adding 2 entries to Dirnames index.
D: adding 12 entries to Requireversion index.
D: adding "4.2.7-22" to Provideversion index.
D: adding 1 entries to Installtid index.
D: adding 1 entries to Sigmd5 index.
D: adding "0beb1e4759ef5a92206941d9f0c9a52e0d546a2c" to Sha1header index.

You should now be able to install or upgrade using yum.