If you are trying to use rpm or yum (which in turn calls RPM) and its showing a locker issues that looks something like this:

rpmdb: Lock table is out of available locker entries
error: db4 error(22) from db->close: Invalid argument
error: cannot open Packages index

or

rpmdb: Lock table is out of available locker entries
error: db4 error(22) from db->close: Invalid argument
error: cannot open Packages index using db3 - Cannot allocate memory (12)
error: cannot open Packages database in /var/lib/rpm

Solution :
Make a backup of /var/lib/rpm in case you break something:

tar cvzf rpmdb-backup.tar.gz /var/lib/rpm

Remove the Berkeley databases that rpm uses:

rm /var/lib/rpm/__db.00*

Make rpm rebuild the databases from scratch (may take a short while):

rpm –rebuilddb

Now, check rpm to make sure everything is okay:

rpm -qa | sort

Why does this happen?
When rpm accesses the Berkeley database files, it makes temporary locker entries within the tables while it searches for data. If you control-c your rpm processes often, this issue will occur much sooner because the locks are never cleared.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 13th, 2008 at 1:28 pm and is filed under WHM/cPanel, Plesk, Linux. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.