SysAdmin’s Diary

This is my experience several months ago, I rewrite the details for the sake of my reference. The operating system is Fedora Core 4 but I believe this tutorial is applicable for any RPM-based Linux distro.

Symptom
User complaint there was a problem to install a RPM file,

[root@www ~]# rpm -iv /tmp/packet.core
error: Unable to open /usr/lib/rpm/rpmrc for reading: No such file or directory.
[root@www ~]# cd /usr/lib/rpm
-bash: cd: /usr/lib/rpm: No such file or directory

Looks like /usr/lib/rpm was missing/deleted. Damn! I wish I know who is the culprit.

Steps Taken To Repair

• Download RPM package for Fedora Core 4 from http://mirrors.kernel.org/fedora/core/4/i386/os/Fedora/RPMS/rpm-4.4.1-21.i386.rpm
• Extract the RPM file (in MS-WIndows, use 7-Zip)
• Copy the whole /usr/lib/rpm from above step to the server
• Re-install RPM again,

  [root@www ~]# rpm -ivh --force /tmp/rpm-4.4.1-21.i386.rpm
  warning: /tmp/rpm-4.4.1-21.i386.rpm: Header V3 DSA signature: NOKEY, key ID 4f2a6fd2
  Preparing...                ########################################### [100%]
     1:rpm                    ########################################### [100%]

• Verify the installation is successful and the RPM DB is not corrupted,

  [root@www ~]# rpm -q rpm
  rpm-4.4.1-21

• The package should be able to be installed now,

  [root@www ~]# rpm -ivh --test /tmppacket.core
  Preparing...                ########################################### [100%]
          package OB2-CORE-A.06.00-1 is already installed

Everything is working back, yay!

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