g wrote on 01/11/2011 11:58 AM:
> ...
> i imagine RHN is in repos list for those using sl and are registered
> users.

Not sure why a registered RHEL user would be using SL repos.

> ...
> Could not retrieve mirrorlist
> http://mirrors.redhat.com/mirrorlist?repo=epel-5&arch=i386/ error was

The mirrorlist line in my /etc/yum.repos.d/epel.repo looks like:

mirrorlist=http://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/mirrorlist?repo=epel-5&arch=$basearch

You can download the epel-release-5-4 package from a mirror such as

http://ftp.linux.ncsu.edu/pub/epel/5/i386/epel-release-5-4.noarch.rpm

and install with rpm, checking for /etc/yum.repos.d/epel*.repo.rpm* 
files and replacing the bad repo definitions with the new version[s].

Phil