[CentOS] Why is yum not liked by some?

Thu Sep 8 02:03:07 UTC 2005
Dave Gutteridge <dave at tokyocomedy.com>

As for finding out what my "baseurl" is, I'm not sure I'm doing the 
right thing. I tried the command suggested, and I got the following result:
[root at localhost ~]# grep http /etc/yum.repos.d/fedora.repo
grep: /etc/yum.repos.d/fedora.repo: No such file or directory

So I thought I'd look in my repos directory, but none of the files there 
are for fedora or freshrpms.
[root at localhost ~]# cd /etc/yum.repos.d
[root at localhost yum.repos.d]# ls
CentOS-Base.repo  kbsingh-CentOS-Extras.repo  output.txt
dag.repo          kbsingh-CentOS-Misc.repo

Also, based on what was suggested to me in this thread, I tried running 
'shutdown now -Fr', and on reboot, the system did some kind of check, 
but returned no errors or anything. It kind of flickered to my GUI log 
in screen before I could see anything come of it.

Then I tried running fsck on var as was also suggested. But that 
produced some kind of error:
[root at localhost ~]# fsck /var
fsck 1.35 (28-Feb-2004)
e2fsck 1.35 (28-Feb-2004)
fsck.ext2: Is a directory while trying to open /var

The superblock could not be read or does not describe a correct ext2
filesystem.  If the device is valid and it really contains an ext2
filesystem (and not swap or ufs or something else), then the superblock
is corrupt, and you might try running e2fsck with an alternate superblock:
    e2fsck -b 8193 <device>

And all this reminded me, I have a little extra space on my disk which 
is not partitioned:
Disk /dev/hdb: 30.7 GB, 30738677760 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 3737 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/hdb1   *           1        3644    29270398+  83  Linux
/dev/hdb2            3645        3737      747022+   f  W95 Ext'd (LBA)

Should I turn that into a Linux swap, and might that help with this YUM 
issue? A guy on this list gave me some instructions for doing that, but 
I got this error from fdisk:
[root at localhost yum.repos.d]# fdisk /dev/hdb
The number of cylinders for this disk is set to 3737.
There is nothing wrong with that, but this is larger than 1024,
and could in certain setups cause problems with:
1) software that runs at boot time (e.g., old versions of LILO)
2) booting and partitioning software from other OSs
   (e.g., DOS FDISK, OS/2 FDISK)
Command (m for help): t
Partition number (1-5): 2
Hex code (type L to list codes): 82
You cannot change a partition into an extended one or vice versa
Delete it first.

Dave