[K12OSN] Frustration with RHEL6.1 (Jim Kinney)

[Carl Keil]

Maybe my experience has nothing to do with your problem, but I had very, 
very similar yum symptoms after my recent install of Centos 5.6.  It 
turned out that my router, for some reason, wasn't routing to my 
server.  I think it was because I was using the same server, and IP 
address as the old install, but I swapped out a different NIC.  (I was 
getting back on my feet after the death of my boot drive.)  My theory is 
that somehow the gateway to the internet was remembering the old MAC 
address and not simply relaying things to the old IP.   As soon as I 
undid the port forwarding on the router and reset it, everything was 
like the good old days of 2009, not 2000.  I know what you mean, I had 
that exact same thought during my ordeal.  It was a really bad, 
frustrating flashback.  Both the feeling that Linux wasn't "mature" and 
that I didn't know crap about how to use it.  In the end, it had nothing 
to do with Linux.

Try starting a yum updating and then running "netstat" (I'm pretty sure 
that's what it was?)  Or the gui "System Monitor".  Those seemed to 
throw my NIC into "promiscuous" mode and all of a sudden things would 
download.

Could any of that be relevant to your situation?  Have you 
rebooted/reset all the network equipment between your server and the world?

HTH

ck