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I recently booted up a long-powered-off test system for a customer, and realized it was still CentOS 4.7. up2date gives one of these error messages:


Error: Bad/Outdated Mirrorlist and Baseurl

[Errno -1] Header is not complete.
Trying other mirror.


To fix, first run this to update to a newer version of yum:

for i in \
libxml2-2.6.16-12.6.i386.rpm \
libxml2-python-2.6.16-12.6.i386.rpm \
readline-4.3-13.i386.rpm \
python-2.3.4-14.7.el4.i386.rpm \
python-elementtree-1.2.6-5.el4.centos.i386.rpm \
sqlite-3.3.6-2.i386.rpm \
python-sqlite-1.1.7-1.2.1.i386.rpm \
elfutils-0.97.1-5.i386.rpm \
popt-1.9.1-32_nonptl.i386.rpm \
rpm-libs-4.3.3-32_nonptl.i386.rpm \
rpm-4.3.3-32_nonptl.i386.rpm \
rpm-python-4.3.3-32_nonptl.i386.rpm \
python-urlgrabber-2.9.8-2.noarch.rpm \
yum-metadata-parser-1.0-8.el4.centos.i386.rpm \
yum-2.4.3-4.el4.centos.noarch.rpm
do
rpm -Uvh http://archive.kernel.org/centos/4.9/os/i386/CentOS/RPMS/${i};
done

(note: the order is important for the dependencies, and the trailing “\” prevents bash from spitting out interpretation errors, but makes it readable.)

Then edit /etc/yum.repos.d/CentOS-Base.repo: comment out mirrorlist directives, and in each enabled section add baseurl=http://archive.kernel.org/centos/4.9/os/$basearch, baseurl=http://archive.kernel.org/centos/4.9/updates/$basearch, etc.

Note the change from vault.centos.org to archive.kernel.org/centos – the CentOS Vault is handling RPM headers differently than yum in CentOS 4.9 expects. The Kernel.org archive does not.