Re: 'yum update' error - Cannot retrieve repository metadata

On Sun, 2009-09-13 at 19:24 +0100, Andrew Wheal wrote:
> After a fresh install of CentOS 5.3, 'yum update' has been been
> failing to run.  I have posted this problem on the CentOS forums,
> which can be found at this link:
>  
> https://www.centos.org/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=22178
>  
> The people on that forum have been very helpful so far but have run
> out of ideas why it is not working.  One member suggested that I come
> here to see if anyone is able to help.
>  
> When I run 'yum update' now the output is as follows:
>  
> Loaded plugins: fastestmirror
> Determining fastest mirrors
> http://mirror.bytemark.co.uk/centos/5/os/x86_64/repodata/repomd.xml:
> [Errno 12] Timeout: <urlopen error timed out>
> Trying other mirror.
> Error: Cannot retrieve repository metadata (repomd.xml) for
> repository: base. Please verify its path and try again
> 
> Any help with this problem would be much appreciated.
> _______________________________________________
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> [email protected]
> http://lists.baseurl.org/mailman/listinfo/yum

I actually joined this list trying to find an answer very similar
symptoms.  It looked like things were working - but it took 13 minutes
to download the Fedora repo repomd.xml file.  Was going to take an
estimate 15 thousand hours to download the primary_sqlite database.  Uh
- my connection's bad, but not that bad...  It turns out that I forgot
to put a "k" behind my bandwidth argument in my yum.conf.  So, my
connection was 1024 times slower than I expected, but ironically, 100%
functionally accurate for what I'd told it to do...  DOH!  

Broken:
	throttle=60%
	bandwidth=12.5

Correct:
	throttle=60%
	bandwidth=12.5k

You can also run a tcpdump to make sure traffic is actually passing
to/from your computer when you do the yum update.