Thanks for the reply @frankbell.
Here's what had happened.
Firstly:
when I went to register the certificate, it failed. since path
was not found.
I thought it was locked, but my findings revealed that niether the path was locked by another application, nor found a lock file.
Secondly:
It turned out that the mount /var/ had a few errors; had to boot to single user mode, run
.
had some hidden errors in it even though it was clean.
Thirdly:
then I had to run the
.
conclusion:
the errors were complaining about cache. cache lives under /var [like you mentioned]. /var had issues. That's how it got screwed up.