Up2date http forbidden error when trying to use local yum repository

Question

I have recently set up a local yum repository according to the directions in the document located at http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/articles/servers-storage-admin/yum-repo-setup-1659167.html
Now, when I run up2date -u, I get the following output:
There was a fatal error communicating with the server. The message was:
An HTTP error occurred:
URL: http://us1lxmgt1/yum/EnterpriseLinux/EL5/latest/x86_64//headers/header.info
Status Code: 403
Error Message: Forbidden
Thinking this was a problem with my repository or web server setup, I used wget to download the header.info file mentioned in the error, but this works perfectly as shown from the output below:
# wget http://us1lxmgt1/yum/EnterpriseLinux/EL5/latest/x86_64//headers/header.info
--2013-03-09 19:05:19-- http://us1lxmgt1/yum/EnterpriseLinux/EL5/latest/x86_64//headers/header.info
Resolving us1lxmgt1... 159.234.2.1
Connecting to us1lxmgt1|159.234.2.1|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 1510242 (1.4M) [text/plain]
Saving to: `header.info'
100%[==============================================================================================================================================>] 1,510,242 --.-K/s in 0.06s
2013-03-09 19:05:19 (23.6 MB/s) - `header.info' saved [1510242/1510242]
Running up2date with no options yields the following:
An error has occurred:
exceptions.KeyError
See /var/log/up2date for more information
and /var/log/up2date contains:
[Sat Mar  9 19:06:33 2013] up2date File "/usr/share/rhn/up2date_client/gui.py", line 1331, in onChannelsPagePrepare
values.append(channel['NAME'])
File "/usr/share/rhn/up2date_client/rhnChannel.py", line 48, in __getitem__
return self.dict[item]
[Sat Mar  9 19:06:40 2013] up2date availablePackageList from network
[Sat Mar  9 19:06:40 2013] up2date
An HTTP error occurred:
URL: http://us1lxmgt1/yum/EnterpriseLinux/EL5/latest/x86_64//headers/header.info
Status Code: 403
Error Message: Forbidden
Any ideas what might be going wrong?
Thanks
Edited by: tafairch on Mar 9, 2013 4:09 PM

Answer 1

tafairch wrote:
Actually, I have set up both. The only uncommented lines in the /etc/sysconfig/rhn/sources file are:
yum el5_$ARCH_latest http://us1lxmgt1/yum/EnterpriseLinux/EL5/latest/$ARCH/
yum ol5_$ARCH_latest http://us1lxmgt1/yum/OracleLinux/OL5/latest/$ARCH/
I also have a repo file in /etc/yum.repos.d. In that file the only sections marked enabled are the following:
[el5_latest]
name=Oracle Linux $releasever - $basearch - latest
baseurl=http://us1lxmgt1/yum/EnterpriseLinux/EL5/latest/$basearch/
gpgcheck=1
enabled=1
[ol5_latest]
name=Oracle Linux $releasever - $basearch - latest
baseurl=http://us1lxmgt1/yum/OracleLinux/OL5/latest/$basearch/
gpgcheck=1
enabled=1
Thanks for the helpFirst of all, having both of these setup is completely redundant. The only difference between these two channels is that the el5 channel contains rpms from before the release of OL5.6 and up to now and the ol5 channel only contains everything since OL5.6 to now.
Second, can you post the entire sources file?
Third, though Dude isn't completely correct about the use of up2date, you can use yum on OL5 to get updates from the server, but you'd need to just use yum and not up2date in that case. For some reason, when you configure up2date to use yum via the sources file it uses a completely different stack of yum software other than the yum client that is installed by the yum rpms. Instead, it uses the older header format provided by yum-arch. When you use yum by itself, it uses the metadata that's created from createrepo instead (think repodata).
Fourth, you may have better luck with using the yum client overall. And actually, in the long run you would be better served to use yum since asa OL4 is phased out, we're going to discontinue yum-arch which will in turn stop the up2date clients from working in this scenario. (Note: we don't use yum-arch to generate header information for ULN.)