Were using red hat 9 as a web hosting and email server (now i dont need any advices about upgrading to Enterprise or another distro, were migrating to suse 9 rather soon anyway)... now heres the problem...

sometimes when i try to install rpm packages, the rpm system stops responding... if i try to install other packages after that... rpm simply freezes... (and yeah im doing it in console "rpm -i packagename"...

anyway it all works normaly after system reboot... but since this is a server used by multiple companys, im not too fancy rebooting it if not necessary, and with my experience with linux, it ussualy isnt (unlike on windoze)...

i tried to "killall rpm" and "killall rpmq" but its the same, how could i restart the rpm service or whatever runs there, so that i could make rpm functional again without rebooting the system or changing runlevel...

tnx in advnace
Phoenix

This kind of thing has happened to me in the past. This is how I solved (from memory...):

• ps -ef | grep rpm => kill all processes (if I remember well there was some python script hanged up, so your killall commands might not be enough...). Make sure you kill as well any process that might fire rpm as a subprocess (yum, apt, synaptic, etc...)
• if rpm still hangs-up after that, make sure again all processes are killed and delete every __db.00x file in /var/lib/rpm
• try again, it should work now.