I have a RHEL 6 system, that I primarily manage through RHN Satellite. Recently I scheduled some updates through Satellite and received a response that the updates had failed. I ssh'd into the system to investigate, and saw this warning when running yum:
Warning: RPMDB altered outside of yum.
How do I fix this warning?
As noted by arana and supported by RHEL documentation, another command (that worked in my situation) is:
yum history sync
It will iterate through the installed RPMs and synchronize the rpm & yumdb databases.
As mentioned in the comments, this is a harmless warning that informs you that a package has been installed or removed directly using the rpm command instead of yum. The difference is that yum is smarter in automatically resolving dependencies, and it is the default way of keeping the package-management DB on your system up-to-date (hence the warning).
See Execution of yum leads to "Warning: RPMDB altered outside of yum." for an official explanation of the message on the Red Hat Customer Portal.
To get rid of the warning, run:
# yum history new
See also yum or rpm, which contains further explanations and links to Red Hat documentation about both Yum and RPM.
