Hi, there! As you may know, current SL6.4 default installation configures yum for "6.x". In this mode,
when 6.5 comes out, the system will automatically self-update. While new to SL, SLC (CERN)
have done it this way since the 5.x days with good effect. For example, the few computers I run
at CERN just recently self-updated to 5.10 and 6.5 without any issues.

So, with some trepidation, I was waiting for SL6.5 to show up and see if my computers
will self-update successfully or crash and burn in flames.

So 6.5 is here, and I am so disappointed because exactly nothing happened.

And a few glitches I need to report:

a) the self update to 6.5 is not happening because "yum" broke - the error is: Error: failure: repodata/b2f5801fbcee3722b2bd03d00d2a725c211a795bcdb6918c45558d9fb5499f7d-filelists.sqlite.bz2 from triumfcs-mirror-sl-devtoolset: [Errno 256] No more mirrors to try.

I guess some kind of mismatch in the devtoolset repository.

To get past this this error, I do "yum clean all". (nightly scripts used to do a "yum clean", but that was taken out recently?)

b) next glitch is with the configuration of our local mirror of SL repositories. "yum update"
runs correctly, but then starts downloading packages from the main SL site instead of using the local mirror.

It turns out that the local mirror is defined like this:

[triumfcs-mirror-sl]
name=Scientific Linux $releasever - $basearch
baseurl=file:///triumfcs/mirror/SL/$releasever/$basearch/os

So until sl-release is updated, it points to the previous release ($releasever).

A fix is to "yum update sl-release", then "yum update" starts using the local mirror and
the reset of the update runs successfully.

Since 6.4 and 6.5 are "frozen" I doubt anything can be done to fix these glitches, but maybe for 6.6 something can be done?

Certainly glitch (b) is kind of nasty as everything appears to work correctly, except for
overloading the central SL distribution servers and for running up unnecessary network traffic charges.


-- 
Konstantin Olchanski
Data Acquisition Systems: The Bytes Must Flow!
Email: olchansk-at-triumf-dot-ca
Snail mail: 4004 Wesbrook Mall, TRIUMF, Vancouver, B.C., V6T 2A3, Canada