Here is a python script that can analyse a rpmdb and also help determining the status of an installed machine:

- /var/lib/rpm/Packages contains all data, the other rpmdb files contain duplicate data for easier access. /var/lib/rpm/Packages is checked against the data in the other files. - rpm header have a sha1 checksum for most of the data. With some nifty lookup you can verify this sha1 sum and thus most of the data to not be corrupted. - A few smaller checks can be done like dependency checking, are packages with an unusual arch installed, which non-kernel packages have more than one package installed etc. - You can choose to check rpmdb against yum repositories to check which installed packages are not included in yum repos or which packages differ in rpmdb. - You can even check rpmdb files from other archs or copy them from some other machine to verify them. All checks work for non-root users.

The python script is available at

http://people.redhat.com/laroche/pyrpm/pyrpm.py

You can call it with:

./pyrpm.py --checkrpmdb

or for the more advanced yum repositories check (you then need urlgrabber and libxml2-python to be installed):

./pyrpm.py -c /etc/yum.conf --checkrpmdb

Let me know if you have questions about this tool, have ideas about further checks that can be added or have problems using it. (Especially if you have real broken rpmdb files on some of your machines, I'd like to hear if some checks could be improved. ;-)

greetings,

Florian La Roche