CentOS 5.2 Upgrade

Of course the release of CentOS 5.2 (corresponding to RHEL 5.2) came the day before I was scheduled to leave to handle my brother's estate. I had already disabled automatic updates on my systems since I prefer to run the updater manually. I guess this goes back to the bad old days when updates frequently failed. Regardless of my motivation, I had no intention of installing a major maintenance release prior to heading out. Even worse, my brother's house in Mississippi barely gets cell phone service; Internet access is non-existent other than dial-up and we had already disconnected the land-line.

Once I got back to Colorado, upgrading to 5.2 was a priority. As expected, this was a non-event except on my wife's computer. It crashed unexpectedly during the upgrade. I was able to complete the upgrade after rebooting so I'm guessing the problem was due to some kind of hardware transient problem. If the system exhibits the behavior again, I'll have to try to figure out what's causing the problem, The weather here is hot and dry with a lot of static electricity so there's a good likelihood that the crash won't occur again.

The crash did leave the system in an inconsistent state with two different versions of the device-mapper rpm installed. This problem frequently can't be resolved through yum since doing a "yum erase device-mapper" results in yum wanting to remove device-mapper and all of its dependencies which would mean coming pretty close to wiping the system. The other thing that makes this problem interesting is the diagnostic displayed doesn't give that much of a clue as to what the problem really is. Running "yum update" when the system is in this state results in yum reporting a version conflict with the "old" rpm version that should have been replaced by the updated rpm for some unrelated but dependent package (the text is something like, "Package blah.rpm conflicts with package device-mapper.i386 0:1.02.20-1.el5 which is already installed.").

The situation can be confirmed by running:

rpm -q device-mapper

This command reported that two different versions of the device-mapper rpm were installed. The trick to resolving this situation is to use the version of the "duplicate" rpm reported by the above rpm command. Using the version reported by yum doesn't work since yum includes the architecture in the rpm name. That is, doing:

rpm -e device-mapper.i386 0:1.02.20-1.el5

fails with rpm reporting that the package is not installed. However, doing:

rpm -e device-mapper-1.02.20-1.el5

removed the "old" rpm while leaving the new rpm installed.

After resolving this issue, I was able to complete the update by just running "yum update."

Cheers,
Dave