Hi Troy,

         I only mentioned it in case it caught out someone else. Seems it is going to remain a mystery.
  There are a couple of other sysadmins with access to this machine, but your fascinating scenario seems unlikely !
  Note, there are two "editing mistakes" with the version of yum.cron on my machine, the 72000 is up against the ]
  as well as the missing $!

  Not worth wasting any more bandwidth on this one.

	Alex

Troy Dawson wrote:
> Hi Alex,
> There are changes here that pretty much have to have been done by hand 
> or by a script.  Was this done by a kickstart script?  Are you the only 
> admin that has root to this box?
> 
> So, to turn yum on do
>   /sbin/chkconfig --add yum
>   /sbin/chkconfig --list yum
> and if it doesn't show as 'on' for the various run levels do
>   /sbin/chkconfig --level 2345 yum on
> 
> yum-conf-4x cannot be installed during the install, it has to have been 
> installed afterwords ... unless it is done during a kickstart.
> I have double checked, and it too has the correct line
>    if [ $utime -ge 72000 ]
> 
> 
> OK, here is what I think happened, but this all stems from you not being 
> the only person who has access to root on your box.
> 
> One of the other admin's has a program that they do not want to get 
> updated by the nightly updates.  First they put it in the 
> yum.cron.excludes list, then they possibly put it in the /etc/yum.cron, 
> as excluded.
> They were looking at the /etc/cron.daily/yum.cron with an editor and 
> accidentally removed a letter.  They might have been in vi and just 
> typed 'x' instead of ':x', which would have deleted the $.
> They then decided that it would be better if yum just didn't run at all, 
> so they did a
>   /sbin/chkconfig --del yum
> Which would turn off yum.
> They then didn't tell you any of this.
> 
> Troy
> 
> Alex Finch wrote:
>> 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