Bug 1271287

Summary: yum hourly cron errors even when configured not to update
Product: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 Reporter: rstory
Component: yumAssignee: Michal Domonkos <mdomonko>
Status: CLOSED WONTFIX QA Contact: BaseOS QE Security Team <qe-baseos-security>
Severity: medium Docs Contact:
Priority: unspecified    
Version: 7.1CC: ahabig, bugsredhat, centos, dmach, james.antill, lmiksik, mails.bugzilla.redhat.com, rhbugs, rs, vmukhame
Target Milestone: rc   
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Hardware: Unspecified   
OS: Unspecified   
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Last Closed: 2018-09-24 12:07:05 UTC Type: Bug
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patch for bug none

Description rstory 2015-10-13 14:26:20 UTC
Created attachment 1082467 [details]
patch for bug

Description of problem:
I have yum-cron installed to do daily updates. Hourly conf is set not to download, update or output messages. However, sometimes when a different mirror gets selected, I start getting this message, every hour:

  Not using downloaded repomd.xml because it is older than what we have

It also contains timestamp info. I get this message every hour until I run 'yum clean all' on the machine.

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):
yum-cron-3.4.3-125.el7.centos.noarch

How reproducible:
Frequently

Steps to Reproduce:
1. run yum update
2. set hourly conf to 'no' for donwload, apply and message options
3. switch to mirror with older repo metadata

Actual results:
error/warning message every hour

Expected results:
Yum shouldn't even run to update metadate when it is not configured to download, update or output messages.

Additional info:
I've attached a patch that moved the update/download/message option check earlier in checkUpdates, and this issue goes away...

Comment 1 Habig, Alec 2015-10-13 16:10:34 UTC
Good catch!  To get this fix implemented now, though, the bug should be reported against yum itself: as yum-cron is now something that's built out of the main yum srpms rather than something I can fix.

so I've reassigned it to Jeff (he's getting the regular yum EPEL bugs).  If this isn't correct, please let me know so we can get this patch to the right person.

Comment 2 Anssi Johansson 2015-10-13 16:16:52 UTC
Last time I looked, yum-cron was a RHEL package, built from yum.srpm. Thus this bug should be filed for Red Hat > Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7, component yum.

Comment 3 rstory 2015-10-13 16:35:30 UTC
I changed the Product to RHEL 7, component yum.

Comment 5 Michal Domonkos 2016-02-02 13:51:16 UTC
Hi,

Thank you for the patch.  However, we decided not to apply it as it would break one particular scenario in which yum-cron is used to only fetch metadata.  In such a scenario, both the download_updates and apply_updates options would be set to "no", and it's likely that update_messages would also be "no", which would cause yum-cron to not even fetch metadata when run.  That is also the default configuration shipped with yum-cron (see /etc/yum/yum-cron-hourly.conf).

We will take a look at how this (if at all) can be properly fixed.  For now, I'd suggest that you just disable the hourly yum-cron job if you don't need the metadata updates.  With the patch, yum-cron would exit immediately (without doing anything) when used in that configuration anyway.

Thanks!

Comment 6 Michal Domonkos 2016-02-22 15:09:04 UTC
Oops, removing the accidental devack+

Comment 9 Dimitris 2018-01-30 09:23:23 UTC
I am having a similar problem. All my servers (30+) produce various errors via email due to yum-cron-hourly.

Most of them look like:
Could not get metalink https://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/metalink?repo=epel-7&arch=x86_64 error was
14: HTTPS Error 503 - Service Unavailable

At first, I tried to modify the config file (/etc/yum/yum-cron-hourly.conf) but these errors are irrelevant to any of the config options, they are produced no matter what.

Eventually I had to disable yum-cron-hourly via my Ansible playbook, that was the only way that I could find to stop the errors.

Thank you.

Comment 10 Michal Domonkos 2018-02-28 13:57:53 UTC
Possible duplicate:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1550075

Comment 11 Ray Foss 2018-06-25 14:21:03 UTC
A couple possible temporary workarounds to end the flood of 503 emails.

1. `# mv 0yum-hourly.cron /opt/0yum-hourly.cron.backup`
2. Filter them out in your mail client. If the emails go to a list of people, that's not ideal.

It's worth noting even setting the verbosity to -4 won't stop the 503 emails.

Comment 12 Michal Domonkos 2018-06-25 15:11:25 UTC
(In reply to Ray Foss from comment #11)
> It's worth noting even setting the verbosity to -4 won't stop the 503 emails.

This has been addressed upstream and a BZ has been created to backport this into RHEL:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1510495

Comment 14 Red Hat Bugzilla Rules Engine 2018-09-24 12:07:05 UTC
Development Management has reviewed and declined this request. You may appeal this decision by reopening this request.

Comment 15 Robert Story 2018-10-24 15:12:57 UTC
Ok, I understand the proposed patch causes an issue. I think the fix in comment 12 (changing prints to log messages, allowing verbosity setting to quelch error messages) is a reasonable work around. Can that patch be merged into 7.5, pretty please?

Comment 16 Michal Domonkos 2018-10-25 09:06:59 UTC
Hi Robert,

I can't speak for CentOS, but if you wish to have the patch backported to RHEL-7.5, please consider opening a ticket with the customer support.

Thanks!