Red Hat Network = Failure

This blog is pretty much becoming a rant blog because of all the failure I see at work.

The failure of today and several times a month for the past few months: Red Hat Network.

[root@xxxx ~]# yum update
Loading "downloadonly" plugin
Loading "security" plugin
Loading "rhnplugin" plugin
rhel-x86_64-server-5      100% |=========================| 1.4 kB    00:00
primary.xml.gz            100% |=========================|  137 B    00:00
Skipping security plugin, no data
Setting up Update Process
Skipping security plugin, no data
Skipping security plugin, no data
No Packages marked for Update

No data, eh? Run it a few more times and it eventually decides there are packages to update and does the following:

Transaction Summary
=============================================================================
Install      2 Package(s)
Update      85 Package(s)
Remove       2 Package(s)         

Total download size: 169 M
Is this ok [y/N]: y
Downloading Packages:

Error Downloading Packages:
  cups-libs - 1:1.2.4-11.18.el5_2.3.i386: failed to retrieve getPackage/cups-libs-1.2.4-11.18.el5_2.3.i386.rpm from rhel-x86_64-server-5
error was [Errno 14] HTTP Error 404: Not Found

Why do I have to see this crap a couple times a month? Red Hat with all its income can’t run the equivalent of a mirror site? Or do they just not give a crap about customers not big enough to have a local satellite server? CentOS is easier to maintain and deploy at this point.

I thought I’d be smart this time and try to pre-download everything a couple days ahead of time. Too bad you can’t even use that when RHN returns empty data sets to yum. The “rhnplugin” for yum should be renamed “failwhale” because Twitter gives better service uptime these days than RHN’s download servers.

Now excuse me while I scounge around other servers yum cache directory for the glibc and kernel updates…