Here’s an unusual one – yum crashed in the middle of an update and somehow recorded multiple versions of glibc and glibc-common being installed, preventing Yum from updating:
[root@server ~]# package-cleanup --dupes Loaded plugins: dellsysid, fastestmirror glibc-2.12-1.166.el6_7.3.x86_64 glibc-2.12-1.166.el6_7.3.x86_64 glibc-2.12-1.166.el6_7.3.x86_64 glibc-2.12-1.166.el6_7.3.x86_64 glibc-2.12-1.166.el6_7.3.x86_64 glibc-2.12-1.166.el6_7.3.x86_64 glibc-2.12-1.166.el6_7.3.x86_64 glibc-2.12-1.166.el6_7.3.i686 glibc-2.12-1.166.el6_7.3.i686 glibc-2.12-1.166.el6_7.3.i686 glibc-2.12-1.166.el6_7.3.i686 glibc-2.12-1.166.el6_7.3.i686 glibc-common-2.12-1.166.el6_7.3.x86_64 glibc-common-2.12-1.166.el6_7.3.x86_64 glibc-common-2.12-1.166.el6_7.3.x86_64 glibc-common-2.12-1.166.el6_7.3.x86_64 glibc-common-2.12-1.166.el6_7.3.x86_64 glibc-common-2.12-1.166.el6_7.3.x86_64 glibc-common-2.12-1.166.el6_7.3.x86_64
Glibc is one of those base packages that nearly everything on the OS relies on. Normally when you have duplicate packages, you can simply run the following command to resolve it:
package-cleanup --cleandupes
But, running this command on a server where glibc is one of the duplicate packages is extremely dangerous. Doing this will attempt to remove everything that relies on glibc as a dependency. In other words, you’re going to end up effectively removing CentOS.
So how do we fix this, you ask? Just tell the rpmdb the package isn’t installed anymore:
rpm -e --nodeps --justdb glibc-2.12-1.166.el6_7.3.i686 --allmatches
rpm -e --nodeps --justdb glibc-common-2.12-1.166.el6_7.3.x86_64 --allmatches
Then reinstall both:
yum install glibc glibc.i686 glibc-common
This should safely resolve the issue.