Yum annoyance: "[Errno -1] Metadata file does not match checksum" over and over

[David Timms]

Andre Robatino wrote:
>  Recently, the error "[Errno -1] Metadata file does not match checksum" 
> often happens repeatedly while trying to download the file 
> primary.sqlite.bz2 from different servers.  It's common for this to 
> happen around a dozen times or more, which since the file is 3.8M can 
> add up to 50M just to download metadata to find out whether there are 
> updates.  For those on dialup, this is a major pain.  Why is this 
> happening?  For example
Each yum repo has a very small file: repomd.xml [eg < 2kB].
This file is used to determine whether there has been a change to the 
repository since the last check {ie yum based tool run - except there is 
an option to only check once each x {default 15minutes} seconds}.
If the files pointed to by repomd.xml on your local disk are not the 
correct size or md5sum, then yum knows it needs to download each one 
mentioned files.
So it uses the live mirrorlist {by default - and customized to your 
country -if more than two in country mirrors seem OK, otherwise the 
general all mirrorlist}, connects at random to one of the mirrors, and 
downloads the apparently ~out of date~ metadata file.

Now, either the mirror that it retrieved repomd.xml from could actually 
be out of date, or all the other mirrors metadata could be out of date; 
I'm guessing the first. This leads to every good mirror providing a 
perfectly good metadata file, but since it doesn't match the repomd.xml 
it is trashed, and the next mirror tried.

In general this shouldn't happen because:
- the ~live~ mirror list provides only mirrors that are up2date.
- the local metadata cache is considered stale and rechecked after 15 
minutes {this speeds up things if you do sequential commands with yum 
based tools.}

In your case something extra is occurring: for the first two mirrors, 
each primary.sqlite.bz2 download is retrieved twice from the same 
mirror, I haven't seen that before. Also, two of the mirrors are 
randomly chosen again. This may be a bug, and I need mire information:

To further fault find this:
1. What is the contents of /etc/yum.repos.d/fedora-updates.repo ?
2. In the [updates] section, what is the mirrorlist= value ?
3. Open your web browser:
4. Copy/paste the mirrorlist url
5. Modify the $releasever to be your fedora version
6. Modify the $basearch to be your fedora architecture
7. Hit go/enter to download the mirrorlist. What does that say ?

Please reply just to the list, thanks,

DaveT.