Unix/Linux : How to fix CentOS yum duplicate glibc or device-mapper-libs dependency error?

Encountered a weird problem or yum update error yesterday while performing this command :

>sudo yum update on one of my Cent OS server.

The update process failed half way and further attempt to sudo yum update again will produce error messages such as :

glibc-2.12-1.166.el6_7.3.x86_64 is a duplicate with glibc-2.12-1.166.el6_7.1.x86_64

and

device-mapper-libs-1.02.95-3.el6_7.2.x86_64 was supposed to be removed but is not!

glibc-devel-2.12-1.166.el6_7.1.x86_64 was supposed to be removed but is not!

From the error messages, the recommended solution is to :

1) use yum check -- which will take a while

2) use --skip-broken -- which will fail halfway as well.

Apparently, this problem was caused duplicate packages that was conflicting with each other. The third solution...which is to ignore the multiple or duplicate packages and brute force yum update will brake your server and cause even more problem later.

To fix this problem :

Perform the following steps, with these commands :

> yum-complete-transaction

> package-cleanup --dupes

> package-cleanup --cleandupes

> yum update

NOTE : You might have to repeat yum-complete-transaction multiple times after you've clean up the duplicate packages.

Reference :

http://serverfault.com/questions/715547/cloudlinux-6-6-x86-64-yum-error