If you are importing a custom distro (MyRHEL6) then our recommended approach to getting a working harness repo will be to symlink that OS major name to an existing one, like RedHatEnterpriseLinux6. We need to make sure beaker-repo-update will skip the repo and not barf on it.
Steps to reproduce: 1. Add a custom distro as per: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1070597#c11 but instead of copying the harness repo using cp, symlink it using ln -s, so that it receives new packages. 2. Run beaker-repo-update. Actual results: beaker-repo-update spits out a warning like this, suggesting that the harness repo was not actually updated: 2014-08-26 10:30:51,668 bkr.server.tools.repo_update WARNING Cannot retrieve repository metadata (repomd.xml) for repository: http:--beaker-project.org-yum-harness-MyRedHatEnterpriseLinux6-. Please verify its path and try again but in fact it *was* updated since the repo which it was symlinked to was updated correctly. Expected results: beaker-repo-update should skip symlinks entirely, so that you can symlink custom distro families to existing supported ones and beaker-repo-update won't complain for no reason.
On Gerrit: http://gerrit.beaker-project.org/3274
This bug fix was applied to the release-0.17 branch, but we are not doing any more maintenance releases of the 0.17.x series. So this bug is fixed in Beaker 0.18.0.