yum troubles

[Paul Howarth]

Peter Lesterhuis wrote:
> hello list,
> I keep on having problems with yum. The next message shows when I try $ 
> yum check-update or yum update
> 
> 
> ]$ yum check-update
> Traceback (most recent call last):
>  File "/usr/bin/yum", line 30, in ?
>    yummain.main(sys.argv[1:])
>  File "/usr/share/yum/yummain.py", line 163, in main
>    (log, errorlog, filelog, conf, cmds) = parseCmdArgs(args)
>  File "/usr/share/yum/yummain.py", line 75, in parseCmdArgs
>    conf=yumconf(configfile=yumconffile)
>  File "/usr/share/yum/config.py", line 48, in __init__
>    self.cfg.read(configfile)
>  File "/usr/lib/python2.3/ConfigParser.py", line 263, in read
>    self._read(fp, filename)
>  File "/usr/lib/python2.3/ConfigParser.py", line 456, in _read
>    raise MissingSectionHeaderError(fpname, lineno, `line`)
> ConfigParser.MissingSectionHeaderError: File contains no section headers.
> file: /etc/yum.conf, line: 1
> '\xef\xbb\xbf[main]\n'
> 
> Considering there could be multiple installation faults I dowmlaoded and 
> installed yum again, but that does not solve the problem.
> Getting desperate,

You have got three garbage characters at the start of your /etc/yum.conf 
before the section header [main] at the top of the file. Get rid of those 
three characters and try it again.

Paul.