If for some reason your server’s disk I/O fails during a yum or RPM manipulation, you can see the following error whenever you run yum or rpc:

# yum update
...
rpmdb: page 18816: illegal page type or format
rpmdb: PANIC: Invalid argument
rpmdb: Packages: pgin failed for page 18816
error: db4 error(-30974) from dbcursor->c_get: DB_RUNRECOVERY: Fatal error, run database recovery
rpmdb: PANIC: fatal region error detected; run recovery
error: db4 error(-30974) from dbcursor->c_close: DB_RUNRECOVERY: Fatal error, run database recovery
No Packages marked for Update
rpmdb: PANIC: fatal region error detected; run recovery
error: db4 error(-30974) from db->close: DB_RUNRECOVERY: Fatal error, run database recovery
rpmdb: PANIC: fatal region error detected; run recovery
error: db4 error(-30974) from db->close: DB_RUNRECOVERY: Fatal error, run database recovery
rpmdb: File handles still open at environment close
rpmdb: Open file handle: /var/lib/rpm/Packages
rpmdb: Open file handle: /var/lib/rpm/Name
rpmdb: PANIC: fatal region error detected; run recovery
error: db4 error(-30974) from dbenv->close: DB_RUNRECOVERY: Fatal error, run database recovery

The fix is, thankfully, rather easy: remove the RPM database, rebuild it and let yum download all the mirror’s file lists.

$ mv /var/lib/rpm/__db* /tmp/
$ rpm --rebuilddb
$ yum clean all

The commands above are safe to run. If for some reason this does not fix, you can get the files back from the /tmp path where they were moved.

Solution:

Please follow these steps to backup and rebuild the rpmdb database:

mkdir /var/lib/rpm/backup
cp -a /var/lib/rpm/__db* /var/lib/rpm/backup/
rm -f /var/lib/rpm/__db.[0-9][0-9]*
rpm --quiet -qa
rpm --rebuilddb
yum clean all