[chef] Re: Recover from a yum error

[Matthew Kent < >]

On Tue, Oct 18, 2011 at 3:39 PM, Michael Glenney 
<
 >
 wrote:
> We have an error that crops up from time to time (often enough to be really
> annoying) with yum in which something get's corrupted with a metadata.xml
> file. Error looks like this:
>
> [Tue, 18 Oct 2011 21:59:44 +0000] ERROR: package[libxslt-devel]
> (cloudwatch_monitoring::default line 27) has had an error
> [Tue, 18 Oct 2011 21:59:44 +0000] ERROR: package[libxslt-devel]
> (/var/chef/cache/cookbooks/cloudwatch_monitoring/recipes/default.rb:27:in
> `block in from_file') had an error:
> package[libxslt-devel] (cloudwatch_monitoring::default line 27) had an
> error: yum -d0 -e0 -y install libxslt-devel-1.1.26-2.6.amzn1 returned 1,
> expected 0
> Several yum packages installed before this one so the corruption is
> happening in flight.  Not blaming chef because I'm sure it's not a chef
> problem, just want to know if I can handle it in-flight instead of scraping
> the entire deploy.
>
> If I try to run the command on the command line of the host I get:
>
> Error: File /var/cache/yum/x86_64/latest/epel/metalink.xml is not XML

Haven't seen this error myself but judging from a discussion in

http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.linux.redhat.fedora.general/366552

I'd wager the culprit is an out of date/broken epel mirror. Seen this
before and it can cause some silly issues.

Possible to to run your own? We rsync epel/x86_64 for centos 5 nightly
here, it clocks in at 8GB right now.
-- 
Matthew Kent | http://magoazul.com