Wedged Repositories

I administer a Fedora Core 6 machine at work. Logged in today and told it to update itself ("yum update"). Checked back a few minutes ago and discovered that yum hadn't made any progress. So I killed off yum, poked around, and discovered that cron had spawned countless instances of this funny rpmq process - one of which was running at 100% on a CPU (I have cores in that machine) and had been running for - well - a long time. Like days. So I killed all of them off, and tried yum again. Still no luck.

Poking around, I found a post on the 'Net that suggested the right thing to do was to delete all of the "__db.00*" files sitting under /var/lib/rpm. That did the trick - unwedged the repository that rpm and yum manage - but I've still no idea why rpmq started dying by falling into an infinite loop. Will have to keep my eyes on that machine for a bit.

Have I ever mentioned my lack of fondness for computers? Yeah. It's a love-hate relationship. On most platforms, it gravitates more to hate than love.