Being annoyed by rug?

Rug/zmd in SLES10-SP1 is still a headache maker. Novell knows this, but I strongly suspect that we'll have to wait until SLES11 before we get anything improved. OpenSUSE now has zypper which works pretty good, and I think you can do it in SLES if you want, but I haven't tried.

One of the chief annoyances of rug is that the zmd.db file kept in /var/lib/zmd/zmd.db gets corrupted far too easily. And when that happens, rug can take HOURS to return anything. If it returns anything at all.

The fix for it is easy, stop zmd, delete the zmd.db file, restart zmd. Since I'm doing this fairly often, I've whipped up a bash script to do it for me.

nukezmd
#!/bin/sh
#
# For killing ZMD when it is clearly hung. An all too often occurance.
#

declare PIDZMD

# First get the PID of ZMD

printf "Getting PID... "
let PIDZMD=`rczmd showpid`
printf "$PIDZMD\n"
# Then unconditionally kill it

printf "Killing zmd hard... \n"
kill -9 $PIDZMD

# Remove the old, inconsistent database

printf "Nuking old database... \n"
rm /var/lib/zmd/zmd.db

# Restart ZMD, which will build a new, consistent database

printf "Restarting ZMD\n"
rczmd start
Simple, to the point. Works.