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.

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.

I changed the Product to RHEL 7, component yum.

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!

Oops, removing the accidental devack+

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.

Possible duplicate:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1550075

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.

(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

Development Management has reviewed and declined this request. You may appeal this decision by reopening this request.

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?

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!