rpmdb open failed

Symptoms

When trying to work with Yum, such as performing a 'yum update' on the system, you may encounter the following error:

# yum update
mut_tas:172, pid: 581778, flag: 19
error: db5 error(-30973) from dbenv->failchk: BDB0087 DB_RUNRECOVERY: Fatal error, run database recovery
error: cannot open Packages index using db5 -  (-30973)
error: cannot open Packages database in /var/lib/rpm
CRITICAL:yum.main:

Error: rpmdb open failed

Description 

This indicates a problem with the RPM database on the machine, and while this isn't managed by the cPanel & WHM software, we still depend on Yum to work properly for many tools, including EasyApache 4.

Workaround

In order to resolve this issue you would want to attempt a rebuild of the RPM database using the WHM >> Rebuild RPM Database tool.  This tool is similar to running the following commands on the system:

mkdir /root/old_rpm_dbs/
mv /var/lib/rpm/__db* /root/old_rpm_dbs/
rpm --rebuilddb -vv
yum clean all

If that works well, the "yum update" command will now work properly on your machine.  If there are still issues after this work you'll want to contact a system administrator as the operating system will require manual intervention to get restored to a working state.