Important: Broken EPEL mirror breaking EPEL in UK - "mirrorservice.org"

[Bell D.]

Hello,

Nearly all of our RHEL4/5/6 desktops and workstations at the University of Southampton use the EPEL repository (via the epel-release rpm). For the past few days the mirrorservice.org mirror appear to be broken, generating errors like these on RHEL:

[root at uos-5416 cache]# yum clean all
Loaded plugins: rhnplugin, security
Cleaning up Everything
[root at uos-5416 cache]# yum check-update
Loaded plugins: rhnplugin, security
epel                                                                                                                                                         | 3.7 kB     00:00     
http://www.mirrorservice.org/sites/download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/epel/5/x86_64/repodata/c33521c50de98dfe6d4031fd81f997e7bdcfc1c2-primary.sqlite.bz2: [Errno 14] HTTP Error 404: Not Found
Trying other mirror.
http://mirrors.coreix.net/fedora-epel/5/x86_64/repodata/c33521c50de98dfe6d4031fd81f997e7bdcfc1c2-primary.sqlite.bz2: [Errno 14] HTTP Error 404: Not Found
Trying other mirror.
http://mirror.bytemark.co.uk/fedora/epel/5/x86_64/repodata/c33521c50de98dfe6d4031fd81f997e7bdcfc1c2-primary.sqlite.bz2: [Errno 14] HTTP Error 404: Not Found
Trying other mirror.
http://mirror01.th.ifl.net/epel/5/x86_64/repodata/c33521c50de98dfe6d4031fd81f997e7bdcfc1c2-primary.sqlite.bz2: [Errno 14] HTTP Error 404: Not Found
Trying other mirror.
http://www.mirrorservice.org/sites/download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/epel/5/x86_64/repodata/c33521c50de98dfe6d4031fd81f997e7bdcfc1c2-primary.sqlite.bz2: [Errno 14] HTTP Error 404: Not Found
Trying other mirror.
http://mirrors.coreix.net/fedora-epel/5/x86_64/repodata/c33521c50de98dfe6d4031fd81f997e7bdcfc1c2-primary.sqlite.bz2: [Errno 14] HTTP Error 404: Not Found
Trying other mirror.
http://mirror.bytemark.co.uk/fedora/epel/5/x86_64/repodata/c33521c50de98dfe6d4031fd81f997e7bdcfc1c2-primary.sqlite.bz2: [Errno 14] HTTP Error 404: Not Found
Trying other mirror.
http://mirror01.th.ifl.net/epel/5/x86_64/repodata/c33521c50de98dfe6d4031fd81f997e7bdcfc1c2-primary.sqlite.bz2: [Errno 14] HTTP Error 404: Not Found
Trying other mirror.
Error: failure: repodata/c33521c50de98dfe6d4031fd81f997e7bdcfc1c2-primary.sqlite.bz2 from epel: [Errno 256] No more mirrors to try.

The yum configuration (as set by epel-release rpm) uses mirrors.fedoraproject.org to generate mirrors to use, which right now are:

http://www.mirrorservice.org/sites/download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/epel/5/x86_64/
http://mirror01.th.ifl.net/epel/5/x86_64/
http://mirror.bytemark.co.uk/fedora/epel/5/x86_64/
http://mirrors.coreix.net/fedora-epel/5/x86_64/

You can view this list anywhere in the world like so: http://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/mirrorlist?repo=epel-5&arch=x86_64&country=gb

The bottom four mirrors all seem to be correct, but the first mirror (mirrorservice.org) is broken, its repomd.xml file refers to files which are not on the mirror (or in fact on any of the mirrors!).

Can somebody either remove the mirrorservice.org mirror ASAP from the generator on mirrors.fedoraproject.org system, or fix the mirror. The one broken mirror appears to in effect break EPEL altogether in the UK because as soon as yum caches the repomd.xml file from the first mirror (mirroservice.org) it then continues to look for the invalid/non-existent SQLite file which doesn't exist on all of the other mirrors - because it's using the repomd.xml file from the first mirror. Right now that means all our server and desktop builds are broken and our customers are reporting that their desktops tell them that the system is not receiving updates.

I've cc'ed in help at mirrorservice.org onto this e-mail since it is their mirror which is currently giving out incorrect info.

Cheers,

David Bell
Enterprise Systems Team
University of Southampton