FC4: Yum complains about "Metadata file does not match checksum".

[Timothy Murphy]

Hans Deragon wrote:

> I did the following multiple times:
> 
> ------>
> [root at snah1 ~] yum clean all
> Cleaning up Everything
> 0 headers removed
> 0 packages removed
> 5 metadata files removed
> 0 cache files removed
> 1 cache files removed
> [root at snah1 ~] yum update
> Setting up Update Process
> Setting up repositories
> updates-released          100% |=========================|  951 B    00:00
> extras                    100% |=========================| 1.1 kB    00:00
> base                      100% |=========================| 1.1 kB    00:00
> Reading repository metadata in from local files
> primary.xml.gz            100% |=========================| 219 kB    00:00
> updates-re: ################################################## 664/664
> Added 664 new packages, deleted 0 old in 5.63 seconds
> primary.xml.gz            100% |=========================| 563 kB    00:00
>
http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/extras/4/i386/repodata/primary.xml.gz:
> [Errno -1] Metadata file does not match checksum
> Trying other mirror.
> Error: failure: repodata/primary.xml.gz from extras: [Errno 256] No more
> mirrors to try.
> <------
> 
> ...and the error occurs all the time.  I search the archives and found
> that this kind of error occurs often, but all the solutions where to
> retry again later and run "yum clean all".  For everybody else in the
> world, it solves the problem.  For me, well I tried multiple times on
> multiple days and I still have the problem.  This occurs on my computer
> at work, behind a firewall/proxy.  However, when I run the same commands
> on my computer at home, at the same time, they work fine.  Thus I
> suspect that this is not a problem with the mirrors.

I got this error the other day.
I was amazed at the sites all over the world that were tried!

My solution was to replace the mirrorlist in the /etc/yum.repos.d/ entry
by a local repository (ie one in the same country), in my case
==================================
#baseurl=http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/extras/$releasever/$basearch/
baseurl=http://ftp.heanet.ie/pub/fedora/linux/extras/$releasever/$basearch
#mirrorlist=http://fedora.redhat.com/download/mirrors/fedora-extras-$releasever
==================================

I'm not clear why this worked, but it did.

-- 
Timothy Murphy  
e-mail (<80k only): tim /at/ birdsnest.maths.tcd.ie
tel: +353-86-2336090, +353-1-2842366
s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland