Unable to update instances on a VPC from within the AWS Cloud

Solution Verified - Updated -

Environment

  • Brand new Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.5 instance (starter image)
  • On a Virtual Private Network within AWS

Issue

  • New Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.5 host built in the AWS Cloud on a Virtual Private Network is unable to connect to the update host (RHUI) when yum update is run. It receives the following error:
https://rhui.us-east-1.aws.ce.redhat.com/rhuilb/content/dist/rhel/rhui/server/5Server/i386/os/repodata/repomd.xml: [Errno 12] Timeout: <urlopen error timed out>  
Trying other mirror.  
Error: Cannot retrieve repository metadata (repomd.xml) for repository: rhui-us-east-rhel-server. Please verify its path and try again

Resolution

  • Run the following steps:

    • Spin up a starter image.
    • Find active repository: grep 'enabled=1' /etc/yum.repos.d/redhat-{eu-west,us-east,us-west}.repo.
    • Edit the appropriate /etc/yum.repos.d/redhat-{eu-west,us-east,us-west}.repo based on the results and change enabled=1 to enabled=0.
    • Edit /etc/yum/pluginconf.d/rhnplugin.conf and change enabled=0 to enabled=1.
    • RHN register with rhn_register or rhnreg_ks command.
    • Run yum to your heart's content (note that the customer will incur network charges from Amazon when using RHN since it is outside the cloud. One of the advantages of the RHUA/CDS solution is that the network traffic stays inside the cloud).

Root Cause

  • A leased VPC from Amazon Web Services does not communicate with RHUI (rhui.us-east-1.aws.ce.redhat.com).

Diagnostic Steps

  • AWS instances come automatically register with RHUI, so we made sure the system was not register.
  • Able to communicate with everything outside of AWS except for RHUI.
  • Component
  • yum

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