On Sun, 23 Jul 2017 23:06:27 -0400, Nico Kadel-Garcia <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

>On Sun, Jul 23, 2017 at 4:49 PM, Stephen Isard <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>> On Sun, 23 Jul 2017 15:55:23 -0400, Nico Kadel-Garcia <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>>
>>>I'm going to urge you to do "yum update" manually, *once*, to see if
>>>the problem occurs today.
>>>
>>>And "sl-fastbugs" is never going to be completely stable. Those are
>>>pre-production bugfixes, highly dynamic and changing quickly, one of
>>>the places most likely to have a discrepancy between the repodata and
>>>the published RPMs.
>>
>> Thanks, Nico.  I've actually done a complete update from the command line, having found that
>> I could update individual packages.  I didn't have any good reason to think that it would solve the
>> problem with yum-cron, but the packages did want updating anyway.
>>
>> The problem wasn't specific to sl-fastbugs though.  There were a couple of sl-security packages waiting too,
>> and after I updated all of the fastbug ones, yum-cron still failed with the same error message
>> on the sl-security packages.
>>
>> There haven't been any updates available since I did the manual update, so I haven't yet had a chance to
>> see what yum-cron will do with new ones.
>
>Then perhaps there is an issue with your nearest SL mirror? Perhaps
>you could simply disable the sl-fastbugs repo for now, and see what
>yum-cron does? I wouldn't activate sl-fastbugs on a production host
>due to potential poor interactions with these leading edge packages.

Can you get anything from the actual error message back in my first post
(https://listserv.fnal.gov/scripts/wa.exe?A2=ind1707&L=SCIENTIFIC-LINUX-USERS&T=0&F=&S=&X=5CC755D9BAD01309BB&Y=7p03xyr02%40sneakemail.com&P=51760)?

It's complaining about a missing file on my local system.  I don't know why yum-cron expects such a file to be there,
but I would expect on general principles for that error message to get passed up through the python calls and for yum-cron
to issue its own complaint. Instead I'm getting a system call error.  /var/log/messages shows 
"python: detected unhandled Python exception in '/usr/sbin/yum-cron'".