This is a rare issue found in certain VPSes purchased as a part of our VPS hosting support recently. There will be no problem within the system but yum will refuse to function properly. No installations or updations will be possible with yum. All you get to see is a collection of error statements in the shell (upon running the yum command):
Loaded plugins: fastestmirror
error: no dbpath has been set
error: cannot open Packages database in /%{_dbpath}
Traceback (most recent call last):
File “/usr/bin/yum”, line 29, in ?
yummain.user_main(sys.argv[1:], exit_code=True)
File “/usr/share/yum-cli/yummain.py”, line 229, in user_main
errcode = main(args)
File “/usr/share/yum-cli/yummain.py”, line 84, in main
base.getOptionsConfig(args)
File “/usr/share/yum-cli/cli.py”, line 184, in getOptionsConfig
enabled_plugins=self.optparser._splitArg(opts.enableplugins))
File “/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/yum/__init__.py”, line 191, in _getConfig
self._conf = config.readMainConfig(startupconf)
File “/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/yum/config.py”, line 754, in readMainConfig
yumvars[‘releasever’] = _getsysver(startupconf.installroot, startupconf.distroverpkg)
File “/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/yum/config.py”, line 824, in _getsysver
idx = ts.dbMatch(‘provides’, distroverpkg)
TypeError: rpmdb open failed
At the same time rpm is also not found to be working for any of the users reporting this issue. ‘rpm’ simply will not install any rpm packaged file. It will exit with no result.
To solve the issue execute the following commands as root:
#rm /dev/urandom
#mknod -m 644 /dev/urandom c 1 9
#yum clean all
#yum update all
