headbeating continues

well, in the production environment, which is fairly chaotic, i seem to have a difficulty getting the repomd.xml file read.  what i get back is:

0001# yum -y -c /etc/yum.repos.d/local-updates.repo check-update
Repository local-mods already added, not adding again
Setting up repositories
Cannot open/read repomd.xml file for repository: local-mods
failure: repodata/repomd.xml from local-mods: [Errno 256] No more mirrors to try.
0001# 

i had an apache conf file (a yum-vhost.conf one) but that broke basic http connections and it resulted in a 404 for the request on the repomd.xml file.  removing it and going straight to the ip address in the client config yields the above.  the client is very simple config:

[local-mods]
name=local-mods
baseurl=http://x.y.124.179/var/www/html/yum/rel001
enabled=1

the file is on the web server under /var/www/html/yum/rel001/repodata

any thoughts / suggestions / help would be appreciated.  this one has me puzzled.

thanks.