Recovering Corrupt RPM DB

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I had a support specialist today that had an open yum task they couldn’t kill gracefully, after kill -9, this was happening

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[root@mybox home]# yum list | grep -i xml
rpmdb: Thread/process 31902/140347322918656 failed: Thread died in Berkeley DB library
error: db3 error(-30974) from dbenv->failchk: DB_RUNRECOVERY: Fatal error, run database recovery
error: cannot open Packages index using db3 -  (-30974)
error: cannot open Packages database in /var/lib/rpm
CRITICAL:yum.main:
Error: rpmdb open failed
[root@mybox home]#

The solution to fix this is to manually erase the yumdb and to manually rebuild it;

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[root@mybox home]# rm -f /var/lib/rpm/__*
[root@mybox home]# rpm --rebuilddb