I support a couple of yum repositories, and use the yum repository build instructions documented in my previous post to create my repositories. When I tried to apply the latest CentOS 5.3 updates to one of my servers last week, I noticed that I was getting a number of “Error performing checksum” errors:
$ yum repolist
Loaded plugins: fastestmirror
Determining fastest mirrors
Updates | 1.2 kB 00:00
primary.xml.gz | 376 kB 00:00
http://updates/repo/centos/5.3/updates/repodata/primary.xml.gz: [Errno
-3] Error performing checksum
Trying other mirror.
primary.xml.gz | 376 kB 00:00
http://updates/repo/centos/5.3/updates/repodata/primary.xml.gz: [Errno
-3] Error performing checksum
Trying other mirror.
Error: failure: repodata/primary.xml.gz from Updates: [Errno 256] No
more mirrors to try.
After reading through the code in yumRepo.py, I noticed that the error listed above is usually generated when the checksum algorithm specified in the repomd.xml file isn’t supported. The createrepo utility uses the sha256 algorithm by default in Fedora 11 (I created my repositories on a Fedora 11 host), so I decided to create my repository using the sha1 algorithm instead:
$ createrepo -v -s sha1 /var/www/html/repo/centos/5.3/updates
Once I created the repository metadata using the sha1 algorithm, everything worked as expected:
$ yum clean all
Loaded plugins: fastestmirror
Cleaning up Everything
Cleaning up list of fastest mirrors
$ yum repolist
Loaded plugins: fastestmirror
Determining fastest mirrors
Updates | 1.0 kB 00:00
primary.xml.gz | 367 kB 00:00
Updates 634/634
repo id repo name status
Updates Updates enabled : 634
repolist: 634
This debugging experience made me realize two things:
I had a h00t debugging this issue, and am glad everything is working correctly now! Nice!