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

[Hans Deragon]

Greetings.


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.

The environment variables http_proxy, https_proxy and no_proxy are set 
properly.  lynx works fine with them.  Anyhow, I don't suspect that the 
firewall/proxy is the problem here as yum is capable to download some files.

So I want to debug this further.  Can anyone tell me what are the 
checksums being compared?  I looked quickly at yum's code, but where the 
comparison is being done, its not clear where the checksums come from; 
It requires much more digging within libraries.  Something is wrong and 
I suspect that a bug report is in order here (even if the problem is 
between the keyboard and the chair, I would think that yum would need to 
report the problem with more details), but I need to figure out what the 
problem actually is and thus, any help for debugging this problem is 
welcomed.

Running FC4.


Best regards,
Hans Deragon
--
Consultant en informatique/Software Consultant
Deragon Informatique inc.     Open source:
http://www.deragon.biz        http://facil.qc.ca (Promotion du libre)
mailto://hans@deragon.biz     http://autopoweroff.deragon.biz (Logiciel)