CentOS6.5: yum error Error: rpmdb open failed

“yum update” took much time when processing “running transaction”, so I killed the process. After that I saw the following errors when issuing yum update.

# yum update -y rpmdb: Thread/process 21307/140433616029440 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

You could solve this by removing __db.* files under /var/lib/rpm directory.

# ls /var/lib/rpm/ Basenames     __db.002  Dirnames     Installtid    Packages        Pubkeys         Sha1header Conflictname  __db.003  Filedigests  Name          Providename     Requirename     Sigmd5 __db.001      __db.004  Group        Obsoletename  Provideversion  Requireversion  Triggername

remove __db.* files

# rm /var/lib/rpm/__db.00* -f

get it fixed.

# yum update –y Loaded plugins: fastestmirror, refresh-packagekit, security Loading mirror speeds from cached hostfile