yum update [Error -1] Header is not complete

[Patrick Doyle]

Hi David,
Thanks for the tips...

> > Any suggestions?
> Very busy mirrors ?
> Aborted mirroring process ?
> Initial mirror selected had old or bad metadata, and hence every correct
> download is rejected ?
>
That was my first thought a few days ago, when I first saw this,
however I am now having doubts about that because:
1) It has been ongoing for several days (not a strong reason, I'll admit)
2) This started with a repeated failure attempting to fetch an
OpenOffice.org RPM.  After I did the "yum clean all", it is now
failing on a kde related RPM.
3) Each time it fails, it chooses a different mirror
4) I can fetch the offending RPM fine using wget at the command line.

>
> I have seen timeouts from extras repos, and even dir lists that take
> more than 10 minutes to complete.
>
> Packet trace the whole yum process: you can see if the client or server
> stops doing the right thing.
>
> yum -d 15 and post the "whole thing", maybe as attach or on a web site
> if it is very big.
>
I just kicked it off, we'll see what it looks like after lunch.

> > $ sudo yum clean cache
> >
> > Returns an error:
> > Error: invalid clean argument: 'cache'
> >
> > despite the fact that the man page claims "yum clean cache" should
> > work (and has worked in the past with older versions of yum).
> - clean cache has been split up into smaller parts:
> clean metadata  {ie downloaded repodata}
> clean dbcache   {sqlite db cache}
Note to self -- file a bugzilla report that the yum man page is out of date.

>
> > If I were to fetch an RPM manually, could I verify that it is correct
> > somehow and then place it someplace at which yum would be happy with
> > it?
> rpm --checksig my-dud-downloaded-package.rpm ?
>
Everything checks out fine.  Can I place the RPM someplace where yum
can find it and see if that makes things happier?  (I just want to do
this for a test -- I don't want to do it for all 14,425,332,864
different packages which would want to be updated, given how long it's
been since my last update.  Perhaps if I were to just update yum,
assuming that's the source of my problem, I could continue from
there).

Hmmm... that's an idea... I'll try a "yum update yum" when the -d 15
attempt finishes.

--wpd