I was patching this “pseudo server” the other day. Resources on the server were not monitored. Of course / was low on space and yum failed. Subsequent run of yum update threw the following message:

[root@web0001 sbin]# yum update
Loaded plugins: rhnplugin, security
This system is receiving updates from RHN Classic or RHN Satellite.
Setting up Install Process
Resolving Dependencies
There are unfinished transactions remaining. You might consider running yum-complete-transaction first to finish them.
The program yum-complete-transaction is found in the yum-utils package.

Not wanting to mess anything up at that moment, I installed yum-utils package. yum-utils contains yum-complete-transaction command. Using this tool, you can either finish incomplete transactions or you can clean up transaction files. In either case the directory of interest is /var/lib/yum.

All that was needed to be done to restart update process was to clean up transaction files:

[root@web0001 sbin]# /usr/sbin/yum-complete-transaction --cleanup-only
Loaded plugins: rhnplugin
This system is receiving updates from RHN Classic or RHN Satellite.
Cleaning up unfinished transaction journals
Cleaning up 2013-08-14.09:04.41