A circular fail with a recent version of YUM – yum-3.4.3-119 – leads to a whole load of the following errors:

http://mirrors.ircam.fr/pub/fedora/linux/updates/20/x86_64/repodata/repomd.xml: [Errno -1] repomd.xml does not match metalink for updates
Trying other mirror.
updates                                                            | 4.6 kB  00:00:00     
http://mir01.syntis.net/fedora/linux/updates/20/x86_64/repodata/repomd.xml: [Errno -1] repomd.xml does not match metalink for updates
Trying other mirror.
updates                                                            | 3.4 kB  00:00:00     
http://mirror.nonstop.co.il/fedora/linux/updates/20/x86_64/repodata/repomd.xml: [Errno -1] repomd.xml does not match metalink for updates
Trying other mirror.
updates                                                            | 4.6 kB  00:00:00     
http://ftp.ps.pl/pub/Linux/fedora-linux/updates/20/x86_64/repodata/repomd.xml: [Errno -1] repomd.xml does not match metalink for updates
Trying other mirror.
updates                                                            | 4.6 kB  00:00:00     
http://ftp-stud.hs-esslingen.de/pub/fedora/linux/updates/20/x86_64/repodata/repomd.xml: [Errno -1] repomd.xml does not match metalink for updates
Trying other mirror.
updates                                                            | 4.6 kB  00:00:00     
ftp://ftp.fedora.is/pub/fedora/updates/20/x86_64/repodata/repomd.xml: [Errno -1] repomd.xml does not match metalink for updates
Trying other mirror.
updates                                                            | 4.6 kB  00:00:00     
http://mirror.sov.uk.goscomb.net/fedora/linux/updates/20/x86_64/repodata/repomd.xml: [Errno -1] repomd.xml does not match metalink for updates
Trying other mirror.

— repeated until there are no more mirrors to try..

The (obvious) problem here, is that although this is fixed in a later release of YUM, you can’t yum update to that, because YUM is broken!

The solution is to manually download a later/good version of the rpm (currently yum-3.4.3-122) and install/update locally, using rpm -Uvh… or yum localinstall…. (which still works..)

Robert Gadsdon.    December 16, 2013.