yum : Could not contact CDS load balancer in AWS

Question

I have an old EC2 instance with RedHat 6.5 installed. When I want to yum check-update, it show following error:

$ yum check-update
Loaded plugins: amazon-id, rhui-lb, security
Could not contact CDS load balancer rhui2-cds01.ap-northeast-1.aws.ce.redhat.com, trying others.


Could not contact any CDS load balancers: rhui2-cds01.ap-northeast-1.aws.ce.redhat.com, rhui2-cds02.ap-northeast-1.aws.ce.redhat.com.

I am able to connect other website, so I assume it is not due to network issue.

Does anyone has know how to solve this issue ?

(all commands are executed using root)

Answer 1

Could not contact any CDS load balancers: https://rhui3.ap-south-1.aws.ce.redhat.com/pulp/content/ .

This error occurs due to the outdated package of the "RHUI-Client", this package helps to get access of the RHEL RHUI repositories. If the version of "RHUI-Client" is below 3, then you can follow the action plan given below. To get the current version of "RHUI-Client" run the following command,

$ sudo rpm -q rh-amazon-rhui-client

As discussed, if the package version is below 3, run the following commands, once done try to perform any yum transaction,

$ sudo wget http://34.249.237.121/rh-amazon-rhui-client-3.0.31-1.el7.noarch.rpm  
$ sudo yum localinstall rh-amazon-rhui-client-3.0.31-1.el7.noarch.rpm
$ sudo yum clean all
$ sudo yum repolist

This should resolve your first issue.

You may get the following message, while performing the yum transactions. This is because, the "subscription-manager" plugin is enabled,

This system is not registered with an entitlement server. You can use subscription-manager to register.

This^ is not an error, this is just a warning message and it can be ignored, you can disable the "subscription-manager" plugin using the following steps,

Open the following file using the following command,

# vim /etc/yum/pluginconf.d/subscription-manager.conf

You should get a similar line (as pasted below), in the file, it says "enabled=1" meaning, the subscription-manager plugin is enabled. To disable it, you need to put "enabled=0", and save it,

enabled=1.   ==> Change it to zero "enabled=0"

Once done, run the following commands to confirm. Now, you should not get any "subscription-manager" warning messages,

$ sudo yum clean all
$ sudo yum repolist

Answer 2

It turns out that it was an issue when updating nss-softokn-3.14.3-19.el6_6, this is one of the symptoms.

The issue has been reported, and you can find a fix for broken yum/rpm in comment#5 : https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1182337

Here is an article about this issue: http://www.ripegroup.com/issues-with-updates-on-centos6-nss-softokn-freebl/

Here are MY steps to fix broken yum/rpm according to links above

First create an temporary folder

$ mkdir my_tmp/
$ cd my_tmp/

Download a sutiable nss-softokn-freebl rpm from trusted mirror

$ wget <your trusted mirror>/nss-softokn-freebl-3.14.3-19.el6_6.x86_64.rpm

Extract RPM

$ rpm2cpio nss-softokn-freebl-3.14.3-19.el6_6.x86_64.rpm | cpio -idmv

Copy extracted library files

$ sudo cp ./lib64/libfreeblpriv3.* /lib64

After this, yum/rpm start to work again for me.

Watch out for difference between 32bit/64bit os, I cannot guarantee it is the correct way to fix it, so use it at your own risk