fedora extras mirror: Metadata file does not match checksum

[Jeff Spaleta]

On 7/27/05, Jonathan Underwood <j.underwood at open.ac.uk> wrote:
>http://www.mirrorservice.org/sites/download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/extras/4/i386/repodata/primary.xml.gz:
> [Errno -1] Metadata file does not match checksum

> However, I don't get the error message when I use
> baseurl=http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/extras/$releasever/$basearch/
> 
> So, I was about to report the problem to the mirror provider, but I'm
> not entirely sure that's where the problem lies. Is there anyway I can
> gain more information on this problem?

The metadata associated with a repository is actually several files.
The list of metadata files for a repository is encoded in the file repomd.xml
which is cached on your system at /var/cache/yum/extras/repomd.xml.
This is the tiny file yum pulls first from the mirror to see if it
needs to pull any other metadata files from the mirror you are using.

repomd.xml essentially provides the mechanism that lets your local yum
client verify that the metadata files on the mirror form a
self-consistent set.  The repomd.xml file contains the sha1 sums that
yum uses. If you want to check by hand.. you download the
primary.xml.gz from the master server and from the mirror server.. run
sha1sum on both and compare those sums to the sha1sum of the
primary.xml.gz you have in your local yum cache. Compare the sums to
the sha1sum listed in repomd.xml that you have locally, on the master
server, and on the mirror server. From that matrix of sum comparisons,
you'll see where the problem lies.

If you contact a mirror while the mirror is processing updates from
the master server, you can run into situations where the repomd.xml
file is updated while primary.xml.gz has not been updated yet.. or
vice versa.  Or you could be having networking problems or filesystem
problems which are resulting in downloading an incomplete
primary.xml.gz.

-jef