Thanks to all that offered advice to help solve this for me. Here's a
round up for those that may follow in similarly ill-fated foot-steps.
1. Don't update/upgrade remotely without using "screen". Dropping the
ssh session caused yum to die inelegantly, with duplicate packages in
the RPM database.
2. Analysing the output from
/bin/rpm -qa --qf '%{name}-%{version}-%{release}.%{arch}.rpm\n' | sort
led me to erase almost 30 new packages that appeared to be duplicates of
existing packages. This wasn't without problems though, because I used
this command:-
yum erase libgcc-4.1.2-42.el5.i386
to remove the duplication noticed here:-
libgcc-4.1.2-14.el5.i386.rpm
libgcc-4.1.2-42.el5.i386.rpm
3. This broke the machine badly, and caused yum to stop working
completely with missing libgcc_s.so.1 being reported as the cause. This
also effected other programs, e.g. man wasn't working either. Anyway,
long story short, I booted from the 5.1 DVD in rescue mode. I was
reluctant to reboot the box in a half upgraded state, but was forced
into this due to the corrupt libgcc problem. I then forced the
reinstallation of libgcc-4.1.2-14.el5.i386 from the DVD using:-
rpm -ivh --force --root /mnt/sysimage libgcc-4.1.2-14.el5.i386.rpm
This worked OK and the machine rebooted without a problem (what a relief).
4. Next I tried the yum -y upgrade process again (from the console this
time), and to my enormous delight, it downloaded the packages I had
removed earlier and then passed all transaction tests and started to
process the 577 steps left to upgrade to 5.2.
5. I think there may still be some duplicates, which I'll check for
after the upgrade has completed. I didn't get all the way through my
analysis of the duplicate package list because of the broken libgcc
issue. Having resolved this with the rescue boot, I took a punt on
"having done enough" and restarted "yum upgrade". Since it worked, I
decided against interrupting it with the view to a subsequent
reconciliation.
All being well, I should have an upgraded machine fairly soon.
Thanks again for your prompt and enlightened assistance 8-)
Ian
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