Centos 5 Yum Is Throwing [Errno -3] Error performing checksum

If you happen to encounter this problem, you could try the following fixes:

 

1| If you are using “custom” repository

If you are using custom repository, which is made by newer version of “createrepo” , there is a big chance that you repodata checksums are generated with sha256.

Centos 5’s yum doesn’t support sha256 checksums, which could lead to the following error:

https://some-repository.com/repodata/6bf3eabf71186292f5559891e9161887b45a647318499e1b0e3b05d6b6e4f62b-primary.sqlite.bz2: [Errno -3] Error performing checksum
The solution is to re-generate the repo metadata with sha1 checksums. You can do this with the following command:

createrepo --verbose -s sha /path/to/your/repository

 

2| Other things to consider/check

While I was searching for a solution to the problem, lot of people had their problems fixed by :

 

2.1| Disabling EPEL repository

mv /etc/yum.repos.d/epel{,.bak}

yum clean all 

 

 

2.2| Disable fastestmirror plugin

Anothere solution (which some people had ack’ed) was to stop fastestmirror plugin.

You could disable the plugin, by setting “enabled=0” in the following file:

/etc/yum/pluginconf.d/fastestmirror.conf