Month: August 2021

First of all, if you can, you really should upgrade, to either CentOS Stream if a rolling release works for you, or Alpine or Rocky Linux if you want the same sort of release cadence as CentOS historically had, and before anyone points out that there’s no direct upgrade path, I know, and that makes upgrading basically a reprovision exercise, but still in the longer term, you’ll be better off. This is a small note I found regarding the current CentOS 6 status:

CentOS 6 is *dead* and *shouldn't* be used anywhere at *all*

Also, if you’re considering the last non-rolling release of CentOS, CentOS 8, keep in mind that CentOS 8 has had the rug pulled from under it in terms of lifecycle and should have been supported until the end of 2029, but that was brought forward to the end of 2021, and so is also end of life.

For the purposes of what follows though, I’m assuming that you can’t upgrade easily for some reason and that’s why you’re here, stuck in the same hole I was.

So, you’ll see an error similar to the below when you run the usual yum update commands:

Setting up Upgrade Process
YumRepo Error: All mirror URLUniform Resource Identifiers are not using ftp, http[s] or file.
Eg. Invalid release/repo/arch combination/
removing mirrorlist with no valid mirrors: /var/cache/yum/x86_64/6/base/mirrorlist.txt
Error: Cannot retrieve repository metadata (repomd.xml) for repository: base. Please verify its path and try again

The fix here is fairly simple and it’s to use the CentOS vault repos, which are snapshots of older release trees.

So to fix the base repo, just copy the following into /etc/yum.repos.d/CentOS-Base.repo

[C6.10-base]
name=CentOS-6.10 - Base
baseurl=http://linuxsoft.cern.ch/centos-vault/6.10/os/$basearch/
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-CentOS-6
enabled=1
metadata_expire=never

[C6.10-updates]
name=CentOS-6.10 - Updates
baseurl=http://linuxsoft.cern.ch/centos-vault/6.10/updates/$basearch/
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-CentOS-6
enabled=1
metadata_expire=never

[C6.10-extras]
name=CentOS-6.10 - Extras
baseurl=http://linuxsoft.cern.ch/centos-vault/6.10/extras/$basearch/
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-CentOS-6
enabled=1
metadata_expire=never

[C6.10-contrib]
name=CentOS-6.10 - Contrib
baseurl=http://linuxsoft.cern.ch/centos-vault/6.10/contrib/$basearch/
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-CentOS-6
enabled=0
metadata_expire=never

[C6.10-centosplus]
name=CentOS-6.10 - CentOSPlus
baseurl=http://linuxsoft.cern.ch/centos-vault/6.10/centosplus/$basearch/
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-CentOS-6
enabled=0
metadata_expire=never

Then to fix the epel repo, this is the vault config to go into /etc/yum.repos.d/epel.repo

[epel]
name=Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux 6 - $basearch
baseurl=http://mirror.math.princeton.edu/pub/fedora-archive/epel/6/$basearch
failovermethod=priority
enabled=1
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-EPEL-6

[epel-debuginfo]
name=Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux 6 - $basearch - Debug
baseurl=http://mirror.math.princeton.edu/pub/fedora-archive/epel/6/$basearch/debug
failovermethod=priority
enabled=0
gpgkey=file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-EPEL-6
gpgcheck=1

If you prefer you can just curl the files down that contain the above config and overwrite the existing old configs:

curl https://www.mark-gilbert.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/CentOS-Base.repo --output /etc/yum.repos.d/CentOS-Base.repo
curl https://www.mark-gilbert.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/epel.repo --output /etc/yum.repos.d/epel.repo

Update – Dec 2021 – Someone posted in the comments to say they couldn’t download the configs using the commands I included in the article, and I realise this is due to the various https settings I employ on the website and older CentOS installs not being compatible with what I enforce, so I’ve added the same commands that are pulling from AWS S3 below to get around this.

AWS S3 hosted versions of the same files and the relevant commands are below:

curl http://mark-gilbert-co-uk.s3-website-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/CentOS-Base.repo –output /etc/yum.repos.d/CentOS-Base.repo
curl http://mark-gilbert-co-uk.s3-website-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/epel.repo –output /etc/yum.repos.d/epel.repo

Update – Feb 2022 – I’ve had to amend the details here again as more and more http mirrors are moving to redirect to https, meaning that on a server with extremely old software packages, you won’t be able to connect as you’ll be pushed to https. Unfortunately this is just to happen more and more, and you really, really should migrate to something more modern, that’s still supported.

Update – April 2022 – I’ve updated the epel mirrors to use the Princeton University servers in the US, as someone in the comments pointed out that the epel mirrors were also not working now.