error: no dbpath has been set

December 11, 2010 at 8:39 pm · Filed under Rants, Sysadmin

I’ve recently been having trouble with a OpenVZ VPS upgraded from CentOS4 to CentOS5, here’s what I’m seeing when trying to rum a yum install of mod_python:
[root@coffee ~]# yum install mod_python
Loaded plugins: fastestmirror
error: no dbpath has been set
error: cannot open Packages database in /%{_dbpath}
Traceback (most recent call last):
File “/usr/bin/yum”, line 29, in ?
yummain.user_main(sys.argv[1:], exit_code=True)
File “/usr/share/yum-cli/yummain.py”, line 309, in user_main
errcode = main(args)
File “/usr/share/yum-cli/yummain.py”, line 157, in main
base.getOptionsConfig(args)
File “/usr/share/yum-cli/cli.py”, line 187, in getOptionsConfig
self.conf
File “/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/yum/__init__.py”, line 664, in <lambda>
conf = property(fget=lambda self: self._getConfig(),
File “/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/yum/__init__.py”, line 239, in _getConfig
self._conf = config.readMainConfig(startupconf)
File “/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/yum/config.py”, line 804, in readMainConfig
yumvars['releasever'] = _getsysver(startupconf.installroot, startupconf.distroverpkg)
File “/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/yum/config.py”, line 877, in _getsysver
idx = ts.dbMatch(‘provides’, distroverpkg)
TypeError: rpmdb open failed
Here’s how to fix it:
[root@coffee ~]# rm /dev/urandom
rm: remove regular file `/dev/urandom’? y
[root@coffee ~]# mknod -m 644 /dev/urandom c 1 9

Nothing else seems to work, but this does indeed seem to solve the problem.

Perhaps I’ll finally get Trac installed…

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