[Yum] Not connecting to repositories

[Peter Flynn]

Joelle Tegwen wrote:
> I'm not able to connect to the repositories. This just started recently 
> and it's happening to me both at home (FC4) and at work (FC5).
> 
> I spent a great deal of time at home researching options and trying to 
> update repository files all to no avail.
> Since it happened to both machines at once I'm wondering if there was a 
> conflict that was created in some automatic update (I have the auto up 
> dater on for both machines.)
[snip]
> Cannot find a valid baseurl for repo: core
> Cannot find a valid baseurl for repo: extras
> Cannot find a valid baseurl for repo: updates

This is a rather frequent occurrence. Yum uses a method of looking up
hostnames (gethostbyname in Python) which often fails, even when the
site is actually accessible.

Michael Stenner posted a suggestion to use /etc/nsswitch.conf (in reply
to my post in February (see thread "Re: [Yum] dag repo problems"), but
I wasn't able to work out what to do with it.

///Peter