Comcast is my current home ISP. Over the last year, I've had a ton of problems with them filtering all sorts of legitimate (outbound) traffic . The latest fun times I've had is the random dropping of SSH connections on both standard (22) and non-standard TCP ports. This occurred while I was running a `yum update` on one of my servers and I hadn't used ` nohup ` or ` disown ` to allow the processes I had spawned to continue to run. By the time I had got a VPN connection up and running, the yum process had been terminated, which in turn caused yum's database to become corrupt. How can you tell that your server's yum database is corrupt? Running yum will generate this vaguely-terrifying error: # yum update error: rpmdb: BDB0113 Thread/process 4498/140039588845376 failed: BDB1507 Thread died in Berkeley DB library error: db5 error(-30973) from dbenv->failchk: BDB0087 DB_RUNRECOVERY: Fatal error, run database recovery error: cannot open Packages index using db5