Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 172962
Yum doesn't support http authentication
Last modified: 2014-01-21 17:53:00 EST
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.12) Gecko/20051018 Epiphany/1.8.2 Description of problem: Yum doesn't support http authentication. At my work we use websense for a web filtering service. It supports asking what user in on a computer if it cannot transparently identify who is logged onto a computer so it can give them the proper policy. Since yum doesn't support http authentication, in order to update you must first open a web browser and authenticate and then start the update. This works but in 15 minutes when the it checks for authentication again it will again cause a problem (it blocks all traffic until it gets a response). Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): yum-2.4.0-10 How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: I'm not sure how to reproduce in a non websense enviroment but I would imagine a yum repo that is behind anything that require http authentication would show this bug. Additional info:
Does this system act as a proxy? Can you use yum's proxy authentication capability to do this? otherwise - if it is just using basic http auth you could: baseurl=http://username:password@somehost/path/to/repo
no, proxy authentication does not work for this and the problem with baseurl method is that the response for authentication come form a different host then the one your are connecting to so supplying them in the baseurl gives them to the wrong host. Not to mention that then passwords are written in planetext in files that are normally world readable though I suppose you could restrict it to only root. Old versions of yum (well, when yum was on yellowdog linux anyway don't remember what version though) then it has this capability and it worked out quite well where it would just prompt of username and password rather then just start to fail.
We're not going to add interactive prompting for username and passwords for web access -- it can be specified in the config. If you need to prompt for some reason, then write a wrapper script to create the yum.conf with that info and then nuke it after use.