Troy,

  It seems something went wrong with my installation then. I had problems getting the onboard ethernet
to be recognised during the installation. Strange if this yum problem was a side effect of that. I haven't noticed
  anything else not working as expected.

  When I tried what you suggest I got:

/sbin/chkconfig --list yum
service yum supports chkconfig, but is not referenced in any runlevel (run 'chkconfig --add yum')


rpm -qa | grep yum-conf
yum-conf-4x-1-5.SL.noarch
rpm -V yum-conf
package yum-conf is not installed

rpm -V yum-conf-4x
S.5....TC c /etc/cron.daily/yum.cron
S.5....T. c /etc/yum.conf
S.5....T. c /etc/yum.d/yum.cron.excludes
S.5....T. c /etc/yum.repos.d/sl-testing.repo

        Alex

Troy Dawson wrote:
> Alex Finch wrote:
>> Two small points:
>>
>> 1) I noticed that the yum update had not run on a recenly installed 
>> 4.4 machine. Turned out that /var/lock/subsys/yum
>> did not exist - don't know why, has anyone else had this experience on 
>> 4.4?
>>
> 
> That happens if you have do a
> 
> /etc/init.d/yum stop
> 
> or have done a chkconfig and turned yum off.
> 
>> 2)  I also spotted a small error in
>>
>> /etc/cron.daily/yum.cron
>>
>>        if [ utime -ge 72000]
>>
>> should be
>>
>>     if [ $utime -ge 72000 ]
>>
>>
>>   Alex Finch
> 
> Nope ... just double checked on a fresh install, it is correct in that 
> is says
> 
> if [ $utime -ge 72000 ]
> 
> I don't know why your's is wrong.  Do a
> 
>   rpm -qa | grep yum-conf
>   rpm -V yum-conf
>     or
>   rpm -V yum-conf-4x
> 
>     plus
>   /sbin/chkconfig --list yum
>   /sbin/chkconfig --level 2345 yum on
> 
> Troy
> 


-- 
  Alex Finch, Research Fellow, Physics Department, Lancaster University.
+44 (0) 1524 593618   http://www.lancs.ac.uk/depts/physics/staff/ajf.htm