Network guru help sought please

[Bill Davidsen]

Timothy Murphy wrote:
> 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.
> 
Since you are tracing the packets, you can look at the DNS request for 
mirrorlist and see what IP is being returned by your nameserver. I'm not sure 
how you conclude that the mirrorlist "is not interpreted" whatever that means, 
you must have gotten a valid IP from DNS, but the name is truncated or not in 
DNS properly, or whatever. Run tcpdump with the -n option and see what IP you 
get back.

I suspect your DNS, but please provide more information. Those lines work here 
for FC{9,10,11} so I believe there's something broken at your end.

-- 
Bill Davidsen <davidsen at tmr.com>
   "We have more to fear from the bungling of the incompetent than from
the machinations of the wicked."  - from Slashdot