OLPC repository problems causing yum to time out

[Chris Marshall]

rihoward1 at gmail.com wrote:
> I was helping an XO user to resolve a problem with yum failing on her 
> system. After trying it on my XO I discovered that the OLPC  repositories are 
> not responding. Hence yum errors out with a  timeout.

I saw the same problem this weekend on 3 different XOs.

> I can fix this for her but that leaves the problem out there for all 
> the hundreds of thousand other XOs. 

I don't know enough about yum and the repository configuration
for the XOs to diagnose or fix this problem.  It was especially
problematic since it happened over the weekend when I was visiting
family and trying to fix their XOs.  Problematic since I could not
get any yum installs working.

>  Is this just a temporary outage?  If not could a dummy responder be set 
> up to prevent the yum time out, as this is a difficult problem for naive 
> users to deal with.

Some specific questions:

(1) Is this a temporary and/or planned outage?  If so
     how are we to determine the status and how to proceed?

(2) What exactly are the yum repositories to use for an
     8.2.0 XO-1?  Not knowing the internal dependencies and
     what not to do to avoid breaking the custom XO configuration
     prevented me from just trying another repository.

(3) Is there a current yum information page re the XO-1?
     I understand that as the SoaS and OLPC distributions
     converge to base Fedora these issues might go away.
     As someone coming up the linux learning curve with my
     XO-1, I need to be able to add software to the system
     without breaking the existing functionality.

In the meantime, I'm stuck with this problem.  Thanks for
suggestions, answers, and even a status update.

Regards,
Chris

> 
> [olpc at xo-4B-CF-4C yum.repos.d]$ su -c 'yum list gajim'
> updates-newkey                                                     | 2.3 
> kB     00:00     
> primary.sqlite.bz2                                                 | 4.1 
> MB     00:26     
> fedora                                                             | 2.4 
> kB     00:00     
> primary.sqlite.bz2                                                 | 6.1 
> MB     00:41     
> http://mock.laptop.org/repos/koji.dist-olpc3-updates/repodata/repomd.xml: 
> [Errno 12] Timeout: <urlopen error timed out>
> Trying other mirror.
> Error: Cannot retrieve repository metadata (repomd.xml) for repository: 
> olpc_development. Please verify its path and try again
> [olpc at xo-4B-CF-4C yum.repos.d]$ 
> 
> 
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