[CentOS] I broke "yum update" - C7

Thu Aug 29 09:58:39 UTC 2019
Gary Stainburn <gary.stainburn at ringways.co.uk>

On Wednesday 28 August 2019 22:41:24 Jonathan Billings wrote:
> If it’s really out of date, you might need to update the ca-certificates package, but that’d have to be a really old system.
> 
> I’d suggest by checking to make sure the clock on your computer isn’t really out of date.  If its right, I’d double-check with ‘curl’ to see if you aren’t getting a MitM response, where your HTTPS calls are being intercepted and resigned by a CA that isn’t in your CA trust.  If that’s the case, you need be very suspicious of your network.

It isn't that out of date. The server is less than a year old, and the last yum update was probably only done about 2 months ago.

I checked the system time and it was only a few minutes out. A quick rdate to my local time server sorted that.

I ran a yum check which took ages but didn't report any problems. 

[root at stan2 ~]# yum check
Loaded plugins: fastestmirror, langpacks
check all
[root at stan2 ~]#

However, running yum update afterwards came up with the same problem.

[root at stan2 ~]# yum update
Loaded plugins: fastestmirror, langpacks
Determining fastest mirrors


 One of the configured repositories failed (Unknown),
 and yum doesn't have enough cached data to continue. At this point the only
 safe thing yum can do is fail. There are a few ways to work "fix" this:

     1. Contact the upstream for the repository and get them to fix the problem.

     2. Reconfigure the baseurl/etc. for the repository, to point to a working
        upstream. This is most often useful if you are using a newer
        distribution release than is supported by the repository (and the
        packages for the previous distribution release still work).

     3. Run the command with the repository temporarily disabled
            yum --disablerepo=<repoid> ...

     4. Disable the repository permanently, so yum won't use it by default. Yum
        will then just ignore the repository until you permanently enable it
        again or use --enablerepo for temporary usage:

            yum-config-manager --disable <repoid>
        or
            subscription-manager repos --disable=<repoid>

     5. Configure the failing repository to be skipped, if it is unavailable.
        Note that yum will try to contact the repo. when it runs most commands,
        so will have to try and fail each time (and thus. yum will be be much
        slower). If it is a very temporary problem though, this is often a nice
        compromise:

            yum-config-manager --save --setopt=<repoid>.skip_if_unavailable=true

Cannot retrieve metalink for repository: epel/x86_64. Please verify its path and try again
[root at stan2 ~]# cat /etc/yum.repos.d/epel.repo 
[epel]
name=Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux 7 - $basearch
#baseurl=http://download.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/7/$basearch
metalink=https://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/metalink?repo=epel-7&arch=$basearch
failovermethod=priority
enabled=1
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-EPEL-7

[epel-debuginfo]
name=Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux 7 - $basearch - Debug
#baseurl=http://download.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/7/$basearch/debug
metalink=https://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/metalink?repo=epel-debug-7&arch=$basearch
failovermethod=priority
enabled=0
gpgkey=file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-EPEL-7
gpgcheck=1

[epel-source]
name=Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux 7 - $basearch - Source
#baseurl=http://download.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/7/SRPMS
metalink=https://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/metalink?repo=epel-source-7&arch=$basearch
failovermethod=priority
enabled=0
gpgkey=file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-EPEL-7
gpgcheck=1
[root at stan2 ~]#