You mean in the terminal on solexa-db you just issued the yum install in, you can issue as the next command wget http://fedora.mirror.nexicom.net/epel/5/x86_64/repodata/repomd.xml and it gets the xml file?
Yup, exactly
As a quick temporary fix/test I would comment mirrorlist and uncomment baseurl in epel.repo and see if the yum command worked.
Yup, tried that
BTW it seems solexa-db may be a RH machine instead of a CentOS machine. see the rhnplugin get loaded? Could that be a difference between the working and non working machines (granted I have not seen any problems with RH machines and epel)?
Yes it is RHEL. I have a mixture of RHEL, CentOS and Scientific and tend to treat them all the same - so sorry that it is technically OT for this list. But you guys (and gals) are just too good :-)
I think it might be good to take this question over to epel-devel (AFAIK the appropriate list) and see if they can help figure out why you are having trouble with THEIR infrastructure. https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/epel-devel-list
I'll do that - thanks.