Description of problem: When the EPEL repo is installed, the proxy settings residing in /etc/sysconfig/rhn/up2date are ignored. At my worksite, these proxy name and password are required to access the wider world. After installation of the EPEL, yum could not get through the proxy / firewall. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. type "yum update" 2. process hangs at 3. "Setting up repositories" 4. Quitting by "ctrl c" brings up the following error message: Could not retrieve mirrorlist http://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/mirrorlist?repo=epel-5&arch=i386 error was [Errno 4] IOError: <urlopen error (4, 'Interrupted system call')> Error: Cannot find a valid baseurl for repo: epel Actual results: See above Expected results: The upgrade process to go ahead as normal Additional info: I can get yum to work by entering the proxy:password details before running the yum command.
As far as I know yum doesn't have any way of reading the proxy settings that are set in up2date. :( Does yum work natively to download your RHEL channels with the correct proxy without having the epel repository enabled? This seems like an issue with the RHEL yum not being able to read those proxy settings from up2date.
yum reads it's proxy info. from /etc/yum.conf ... however when using yum with yum-rhn-plugin, the RHN part takes over file downloads (due to the complexity of RHN interaction) and that uses the proxy info. in the up2date dir.