Network guru help sought please

[Timothy Murphy]

I'm continuing to have problems with mirrorlist in yum.

If I leave the 2 lines in /etc/yum.repos.d/fedora.repo
----------------------------------------
#baseurl=http://download.fedoraproject.org/pub/fedora/linux/releases/$releasever/Everything/$basearch/os/
mirrorlist=https://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/metalink?repo=fedora-$releasever&arch=$basearch
----------------------------------------
as is, and run "sudo yum update" then I get the error
----------------------------------------
Error: Cannot retrieve repository metadata (repomd.xml) for repository: 
fedora. Please verify its path and try again
----------------------------------------

If I comment in the first line, and comment out the second, 
then "sudo yum update" works fine.

On the other hand, on my CentOS machine, the lines
----------------------------------------
mirrorlist=http://mirrorlist.centos.org/?release=$releasever&arch=$basearch&repo=os
#baseurl=http://mirror.centos.org/centos/$releasever/os/$basearch/
----------------------------------------
work fine as they are.

When I look with "tcpdump -i eth0" at the packets 
being sent to the internet, I see that the CentOS mirrorlist
is being interpreted properly, and the packets are going to a mirror.

But the Fedora mirrorlist is not interpreted.
The packets are all sent to
----------------------------------------
14:00:35.753120 IP 192.168.1.2.54778 > fedoraproject.org.http: . 
	ack 1 win 46 <nop,nop,timestamp 46404715 59010547>
----------------------------------------

(This is true even on the CentOS machine;
I cannot use the fedora mirrorlist for the Epel repository.)

I'm completely baffled by this.
I think it began a month or so ago, while running Fedora-10.
But as I say, I have the same problem on the CentOS server,
so it is nothing to do with the Fedora version.

In brief, it seems the mirrorlist command is not being properly interpreted.
I get the same problem with wget, but everything works fine under Windows.

As always, any help gratefully received.





-- 
Timothy Murphy  
e-mail: gayleard /at/ eircom.net
tel: +353-86-2336090, +353-1-2842366
s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College Dublin