CentOS and some issues with yum

July 23, 2008 in CentOS
Tags: CentOS, how-to, installation, rpm, software, yum

At work we have a couple (or two) of some old pc by Fujitsu-Siemens or IBM that we usually give to apprenticies to browse the web or manage via web mail their e-mail during their study and practice period here in our labs.

On them I usually run Ubuntu and CentOS and today with the latest I had a strange issue doing a simple yum check-update procedure after the last one done last month.

The system gave me a series of error messages like the portion below here:

>> Traceback (most recent call last):
>> File "/usr/bin/yum", line 29, in ?
>> yummain.main(sys.argv[1:])
>> File "/usr/share/yum-cli/yummain.py", line 105, in main
>> result, resultmsgs = base.doCommands()
>> File "/usr/share/yum-cli/cli.py", line 289, in doCommands
>> self._getTs()
>> File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/yum/depsolve.py", line 85, in
>> _getTs
>> self._getTsInfo()
>> File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/yum/depsolve.py", line 91, in
>> _getTsInfo
>> self._tsInfo.setDatabases(self.rpmdb, self.pkgSack)


After a quick digging in the CentOS mailing list (local) archive I’ve found that those errors may happen if you’re behind some proxy configuration or, more probably, if a 3rd-party (software) repository modifies the yum version of your system.

So i gave a quick:
rpm -q yum
and verified that they were NOT the lastest and official version of the one provided by the CentOS team, and manually downloaded (and installed) those four packages:

• yum-3.2.8-9.el5.centos.2.1.noarch.rpm
• yum-fastestmirror-1.1.10-9.el5.centos.noarch.rpm
• yum-refresh-updatesd-1.1.10-9.el5.centos.noarch.rpm
• yum-updatesd-0.9-2.el5.noarch.rpm

Done this, a yum clean all followed by a yum check-update and a yum update I had my system again fully functional !!

Hope this helps somebody!