Error 56 when issuing yum update on Amazon EC2 RHEL 6.0 AMIs

Solution Verified - Updated -

Environment

  • All certified RHEL AMIs in any Amazon EC2 region

Issue

  • On Amazon EC2 RHEL (6.0) AMIs you receive the following error when issuing the 'yum update' command, "[Errno 14] PYCURL ERROR 56 - ""."

Resolution

Yum authenticates to Red Hat repositories using x509 client certificates. Often, different client certificates are used for different repositories.  On RHEL 6.0, there is a known issue when yum uses multiple client certificates. When this issue is encountered, the yum operation will fail with the message:

"[Errno 14] PYCURL ERROR 56 - ""."

To resolve this issue, update the nss package on the running system.  This update can be performed by enabling only a single repository so that only one client certificate gets used:

yum --disablerepo=* --enablerepo=RHEL-REPOSITORY-NAME  update nss

Replace RHEL-REPOSITORY-NAME with the actual name of the RHEL repository based on your EC2 region, as follows:

us-east: rhui-us-east-rhel-server-releases
us-west: rhui-us-west-rhel-server-releases
us-west-2: rhui-us-west-2-rhel-server-releases
eu-west: rhui-eu-west-rhel-server-releases
ap-northeast: rhui-ap-ne-rhel-server-releases
ap-southeast: rhui-ap-se-rhel-server-releases
us-gov-west-1: rhui-us-west-2-rhel-server-releases

Additional step for us-gov-west-1:
Edit the following files and replace reference to "us-gov-west-1" with "us-west-2":
/etc/yum.repos.d/redhat-rhui-client-config.repo
/etc/yum.repos.d/redhat-rhui.repo
/etc/yum.repos.d/rhui-load-balancers.conf

Once nss has been updated, the issue is resolved.

  • Component
  • yum

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