CentOS - Jan 2012 - EPEL not working ... is it just me?

This is very strange - has been happening the last few days.   I just
upgraded this system from 5.3 to 5.7 on Monday and the problem started some
time after that (but not immediately because I know I used yum Monday
evening after the upgrade)

I get the following error from yum, but it goes away if I --disablerepo=epel

The funny thing is that the listed xml file I can easily wget from this
system.

Also having the issue with other 5.7 systems that were upgraded from 5.3
several weeks ago and had been working fine since.

I did some googling and found some things to try like "yum clean all"
and I
even deleted the rpm database based on advice from one site, and then
rebuilt it from scratch.  But nothing.


[root at solexa-db varlog]# yum -y install hddtemp
Loaded plugins: downloadonly, rhnplugin, security
http://fedora.mirror.nexicom.net/epel/5/x86_64/repodata/repomd.xml: [Errno
4] IOError: <urlopen error (111, 'Connection refused')>
Trying other mirror.
Error: Cannot retrieve repository metadata (repomd.xml) for repository:
epel. Please verify its path and try again


-- 
?Don't eat anything you've ever seen advertised on TV?
         - Michael Pollan, author of "In Defense of Food"

> -----Original Message-----
> From: centos-bounces at centos.org [mailto:centos-bounces at centos.org] On
> Behalf Of Alan McKay
> Sent: Wednesday, January 11, 2012 9:36
> To: CentOS mailing list
> Subject: [CentOS] EPEL not working ... is it just me?
> 
> This is very strange - has been happening the last few days.   I just
> upgraded this system from 5.3 to 5.7 on Monday and the problem started
> some
> time after that (but not immediately because I know I used yum Monday
> evening after the upgrade)
> 
> I get the following error from yum, but it goes away if I --
> disablerepo=epel
> 
> The funny thing is that the listed xml file I can easily wget from
this
> system.
> 
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?
> Also having the issue with other 5.7 systems that were upgraded from
> 5.3
> several weeks ago and had been working fine since.
<SNIP yum and rpm cleans> 
> 
> [root at solexa-db varlog]# yum -y install hddtemp
> Loaded plugins: downloadonly, rhnplugin, security
> http://fedora.mirror.nexicom.net/epel/5/x86_64/repodata/repomd.xml:
> [Errno
> 4] IOError: <urlopen error (111, 'Connection refused')>
> Trying other mirror.
> Error: Cannot retrieve repository metadata (repomd.xml) for
repository:
> epel. Please verify its path and try again

It seems a bit strange to me that there is only one mirror tried...
As a quick temporary fix/test I would comment mirrorlist and uncomment
baseurl in epel.repo and see if the yum command worked.

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)?

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