Friday 16 January 2009

RHN's yum update fails

I've noticed that quite often Red Hat's yum will fail for no good reason. For example it will just show an error like:

# yum update
(...)

Error Downloading Packages:

samba-common - 3.0.28-1.el5_2.1.x86_64: failed to retrieve getPackage/samba-common-3.0.28-1.el5_2.1.x86_64.rpm from rhel-x86_64-server-5
error was [Errno 14] HTTP Error 404: Not Found

When that's the case, retrying a few times usually does the trick.

I have actually opened a ticket with RHN's support and they've told me these are "temporary errors". Temporary or not they are pretty annoying so here's what I do.

1. Retry manually until you're happy with the list of packages that will be updated
2. Run yum in a while loop so that it retries until it succeeds:

# while ! (yum update -y) ; do echo TRY AGAIN; done

Be aware that if that too many retries can cause your RHN subscription to be temporarily locked-out. I find the benefit too great to care.