yum is great to work with when it works and a pain in the ass when it does not. I recently had a problem where I would get the dreaded metadata does not match checksum warning while trying to update a CentOS 5.3 system I was working on.
filelists.xml.gz: [Errno -1] Metadata file does not match checksum
The problem here is that the repomd.xml which lists the file name and the SHA1 checksum that it should calculate on the file or the file itself is not being updated properly due to some level of HTTP caching between the yum client and the repository server.
Usually you can resolve this error through a metadata clean:
yum clean metadata
…or at the very least, clean all:
yum clean all
In this particular case, nothing seemed to work. I even removed the cache manually:
rm -rf /var/cache/yum/$OFFENDINGREPOSITORY
I also tried to copy the cache from another host which did not have the same problem:
$ another host> rsync -av /var/cache/yum/$OFFENDINGREPOSITORY /var/cache/yum/$OFFENDINGREPOSITORY
Something else was causing the problem — some caching server between me and the repository.
To resolve this issue, I relied on a tip from another site, to disable http caching at the yum.conf level:
#/etc/yum.conf ... http_caching=none
This immediately resolved the problem and yum worked again.
I do not recommend continuing with this flag set in the config as caching is highly useful and makes things work faster. At minimum, it would be best to cache packages with the following option:
http_caching=packages
After going through this experience, I found another option that might have worked better, ‘yum clean expire-cache’. Next time this happens, I’d like to try this option out to see if it solves the problem.
Leave a Reply