All hackers want to live on the edge. What we rarely reflect on is the fact that most things have more than one edge. Adaptation curves have two: one where the early adopters build up their reputation for cool and one where I found myself this afternoon.

Apparently I should have let go of Fedora 6 some time ago. I installed this particular server in December 2006 when FC6 was the cool new girl on the block, and it has been running smoothly since then. But today when I tried to (yum) install a package, there were no servers to be found:

# yum search libxslt-devel
Loading "installonlyn" plugin
Setting up repositories

http://archive.kernel.org/fedora-archive/fedora/linux/core/6/i386/os/repodata/repomd.xml:

  [Errno 14] HTTP Error 404: Server: nginx/0.5.0
...
Trying other mirror.
core                      100% |=========================| 1.1 kB    00:00
Error: Cannot find a valid baseurl for repo: extras

Oops. I looked in /etc/yum.repos.d/fedora-extras.repo which is provides the base URL:

[extras]
name=Fedora Extras $releasever - $basearch
#baseurl=http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/extras/$releasever/$basearch/
mirrorlist=http://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/mirrorlist?repo=extras-$releasever&arch=$basearch
enabled=1
gpgkey=file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-fedora-extras
gpgcheck=1

In earlier experience, the problem has been that the DNS service for the repo that mirrorlist recommends is down, and this is what some googling suggested too. So I went to mirrors.fedoraproject.org to see what it said. The answer surprised me:

# repo = extras-6 arch = i386 error: invalid repo or arch
# following repositories are available:
# repo=core-2, arch=i386
# repo=core-2, arch=x86_64
# ...
# repo=core-6, arch=x86_64
# ...

So core-6 is in the list but extras-6 is not. I tried some different combinations thinking I had got it wrong, but to no avail. Instead, on a whim, I checked out the site’s root where I could navigate to a human-readable list of mirrors and I started checking them out one by one. Uni-Bayreuth seemed to have what I wanted, so I edited fedora-extras.repo like this:

[extras]
name=Fedora Extras $releasever - $basearch
#baseurl=http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/extras/$releasever/$basearch/
#mirrorlist=http://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/mirrorlist?repo=extras-$releasever&arch=$basearch
baseurl=http://ftp.uni-bayreuth.de/linux/fedora/linux/extras/$releasever/$basearch/
enabled=1
gpgkey=file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-fedora-extras
gpgcheck=1

and ran yum search libxslt-devel again. This time it complained about updates instead (Error: Cannot find a valid baseurl for repo: updates). Unfortunately Bayreuth didn’t have the updates catalog which sent me searching in a few other places until I finally decided to try to make do without it by setting enabled=0 in fedora-updates.repo:

[updates]
name=Fedora Core $releasever - $basearch - Updates
#baseurl=http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/core/updates/$releasever/$basearch/
mirrorlist=http://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/mirrorlist?repo=updates-released-fc$releasever&arch=$basearch
enabled=0
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-fedora

It worked, and I was able to install the packages I wanted, but I really need to get myself a newer OS. I’ll combine that with a move to another host; FS-data have let me down once too many, and I’ve never fancied upgrading the OS on a production server anyway.