"Metadata file does not match checksum" error

[Michal Jaegermann]

I wonder if others are seeing similar things of that sort.   I am
trying update a package from rawhide, not even extras/development,
so I start 'yum update some_package' and now yum reads repository
metadata and after that it begins:

....
primary.xml.gz            100% |=========================| 862 kB    00:08
ftp://fedora.bu.edu/fedora/extras/development/x86_64/repodata/primary.xml.gz: [Errno -1] Metadata file does not match checksum
Trying other mirror.
....

After that yum goes with the same effect, fetching on every step the
same 862 kB, through

ftp://fedora.mirrors.tds.net/
http://download.fedoraproject.org/
http://fedora.server4you.net/
http://fedora.cat.pdx.edu/
http://mirror.linux.duke.edu/
http://gd.tuwien.ac.at/
http://ftp-stud.fht-esslingen.de/
http://fedora.gtlib.cc.gatech.edu/

before finding eventually some mirror with a metadata file which it
is willing to accept.  Pretty annoying if one is on the other end of
not-so-fast DSL line and some of these servers are not in a great
hurry too.  Extra spurious beating on mirrors as well.

Yes, I know that in this case I could restart the process with
'--disablerepo=extra*' but once yum started it is not so easy
to dissuade it from continuing (and one hopes - oh, maybe the
next server ....).

As a matter of fact I have seen recently similar things not only
with rawhide but trying to fetch updates for some FC5 installations
while this apparently worked much better in the past.

I am curious what is responsible for these happenings and what can be
done to prevent, or at least alleviate, that.

  Michal