No module named cElementTree yum update error

Found yum broken on a legacy CentOS 5.x server while installing updates. The error was:

root # yum update
There was a problem importing one of the Python modules
required to run yum. The error leading to this problem was:

   No module named cElementTree

Please install a package which provides this module, or
verify that the module is installed correctly.

It's possible that the above module doesn't match the
current version of Python, which is:
2.4.3 (#1, May  5 2011, 16:39:10) 
[GCC 4.1.2 20080704 (Red Hat 4.1.2-50)]

If you cannot solve this problem yourself, please go to 
the yum faq at:
  http://wiki.linux.duke.edu/YumFaq
  

root #

The fix was actually pretty simple, you have an incorrect version of python-elementtree installed. You will need to get the proper version from the CentOS mirror (for your version of CentOS). Here is what I did for CentOS 5.7 on x86_64:

wget http://mirrors.usc.edu/pub/linux/distributions/centos/5.7/os/x86_64/CentOS/python-elementtree-1.2.6-5.x86_64.rpm
rpm -Uvh --oldpackage python-elementtree-1.2.6-5.x86_64.rpm

After that yum worked just fine! Note, if you’re still having trouble check /etc/redhat-release for your current version of CentOS and uname -a for your architecture type.