up2date woes with FC4

[mjinks at uchicago.edu]

I've been away from RedHat-based distros for a while, but I need to test
a commercial app which requires FC3 or FC4, so today I set up an FC4
machine using .iso's freshly downloaded from a mirror.

I did a base "server" install and all seemed to go well, but somehow I
managed to leave out X11 support, which our app needs, so I'm trying to
install it using up2date.

Well, just about anything I try to do with up2date fails, and each time
I try I tend to get different errors.  A few samples:

"
There was some sort of I/O error: <urlopen error (110, 'Connection timed
out')>
"

"
There was some sort of I/O error: <urlopen error (104, 'Connection reset
by peer')>
"

"
There was a fatal error communicating with the server. The message was:

An HTTP error occurred:
URL:
http://linux.admin.uillinois.edu/pub/linux/fedora/linux/core/updates/4/i386///openssl-0.9.7f-7.10.i686.rpm
Status Code: 403
Error Message: Forbidden
"


...and so on.  This happens whether I try to do "up2date --nox --list",
"up2date --nox --install xorg-x11", "up2date --nox -u", or just about
anything else.  I can't find any pattern to the errors; trying the same
thing twice in a row has yet to produce the same error twice.

Sometimes the error message directs me to /var/log/up2date, for example:

[...]
initRepo
bytes=440-35945
initRepo
bytes=440-25242
An error has occurred:
exceptions.IndexError
See /var/log/up2date for more information

But in that log file I find what looks to me like a Python traceback, but
nothing in it suggests anything meaningful to me.

Since I've gotten lots of 403 and 404 errors, I wonder: is there a
problem currently with a lot of Fedora mirrors?  I've gotten these from
several different servers, so I don't think it's one corrupt mirror
someplace.  When I do get errors from the same server twice, it tends to
be complaining about two different URL's.  I thought I might be tripping
over mirrors in the midst of re-seeding themselves or something, but the
trouble has been persisting now for several hours.

I've tried reinstalling the system from scratch, thinking there might
have been some database corruption or some such; no difference.

So now I'm stuck.  Anybody have any idea what might be wrong?

Thanks,
--michael