rpmdb issue: cannot reinit or rebuild, also yum is broken!

[n6rb2012]

hey all:


first post today. having a fairly major issue that i have not yet managed to solve on my own.

i have already performed several searches to troubleshoot this issue and none of the typical
remedies appear to work.

as you can see below my yum / rpm database(s) are corrupted and the system will not let me rebuild them

bash-4.2# rpm --rebuilddb
error: db4 error(22) from dbenv->open: Invalid argument
error: cannot open Packages index using db4 - Invalid argument (22)
bash-4.2# rpm --initdb
error: db4 error(22) from dbenv->open: Invalid argument
error: cannot open Packages index using db4 - Invalid argument (22)
bash-4.2# yum clean all
error: db4 error(22) from dbenv->open: Invalid argument
error: cannot open Packages index using db4 - Invalid argument (22)
error: cannot open Packages database in /var/lib/rpm
CRITICAL:yum.main:

Error: rpmdb open failed

i have already tried deleting the .rpm.lock file and this seems not to help.

here is the output of "ls -al /var/lib/rpm"

bash-4.2# pwd
/var/lib/rpm
bash-4.2# ls -al
total 99980
drwxr-xr-x.  2 root root     4096 Jan 12 18:42 .
drwxr-xr-x. 54 root root     4096 Jan 12 18:42 ..
-rw-r--r--.  1 root root  7323648 Jan 12 18:04 Basenames
-rw-r--r--.  1 root root    16384 Jan 10 00:27 Conflictname
-rw-r--r--.  1 root root  1622016 Jan 12 18:04 Dirnames
-rw-r--r--.  1 root root    45056 Jan 12 18:04 Group
-rw-r--r--.  1 root root    36864 Jan 12 18:04 Installtid
-rw-r--r--.  1 root root    98304 Jan 12 18:04 Name
-rw-r--r--.  1 root root    40960 Jan  9 13:59 Obsoletename
-rw-r--r--.  1 root root 90607616 Jan 12 18:04 Packages
-rw-r--r--.  1 root root  1249280 Jan 12 18:04 Providename
-rw-r--r--.  1 root root   888832 Jan 10 00:27 Requirename
-rw-r--r--   1 root root        0 Jan 12 18:42 .rpm.lock
-rw-r--r--.  1 root root   245760 Jan 12 18:04 Sha1header
-rw-r--r--.  1 root root   151552 Jan 12 18:04 Sigmd5
-rw-r--r--.  1 root root     8192 Jan  4 08:28 Triggername

this is my main production machine and i would like to have it as clean & correct as possible.

if anyone has any suggestions or helpful hints i would be most appreciative.

thank you in advance,

n6

---------- Post added at 11:58 PM ---------- Previous post was at 11:43 PM ----------

nevermind for some reason this was fixed by rebooting

forgot to mention this was a Fedora 16 install

probably just a late in the day fix to some packages in rawhide ?

did you try any of this? http://www.oldrpm.org/hintskinks/repairdb/