Repair the RPM database Revision as of Sunday, 20 December 2015 at 19:56 UTC
I had a problem with running a yum update on some package. The process
would sleep indefinitely. A clue that something was wrong with the RPM
database (at /var/lib/rpm) was that running rpm -qa would hang as
well.
The solution is to rebuild the RPM database. In short:
# Backups!
tar -czvf /tmp/rpm.tgz /var/lib/rpm
# Remove the database locks
rm -f /var/lib/rpm/__db*
# Rebuild!
rpm -vv --rebuilddb
That should do it.