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I was caught by this when upgrading CentOS servers from 5.2 to 5.3. Should make it a habit to atleast read the release notes!!

When upgrading from an earlier version of Red Hat
Enterprise Linux to 5.3, you may encounter the following
error:

Updating : mypackage ################### [
472/1655]rpmdb: unable to lock mutex: Invalid argument

The cause of the locking issue is that the shared futex
locking in glibc was enhanced with per-process futexes
between 5.2 and 5.3. As a result, programs running against
the 5.2 glibc can not properly perform shared futex locking
against programs running with the 5.3 glibc.

This particular error message is a side effect of a package
calling rpm as part of its install scripts. The rpm
instance performing the upgrade is using the prior glibc
throughout the upgrade, but the rpm instance launched from
within the script is using the new glibc.

To avoid this error, upgrade glibc first in a separate run,
ie

# yum update glibc
# yum update

You will also see this error if you downgrade glibc to an
earlier version on an installed 5.3 system.

These are supplement notes I had taken down a while back doing an install of nagios and n2rrd on a Fedora-7 box and recently came very handy when doing the install in a redhat (RHEL-3) box as well:

Nagios Install:

On RHEL3, I used (dags rpms) rpmforge. Here is my yum.conf for rpmforge:

Notes: I settled for icmp instead of ping, as it is a lot faster. However, icmp required setting setuid for "/usr/lib/nagios/plugins/check_icmp" for it to work. Also, had to rebuild nagios-plugins from source as root in order for the plugin to be installed.

Recently built an rpm for a client that needed to install nsis-2.29 on several redhat boxes. nsis-2.28 for centos/fedora is readily available at repo.calcforge.org .

I downloaded the centos source rpm and rebuilt it for redhat4 as described below: