random neuron misfires

I run a VMware ESXi server here that hosts ~500 separate VMs, clones, templates and test builds of operating systems for testing, development, personal playground and other roles.

Some of these VMs are older Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian and various other Linux distributions. Since those distributions are no longer active, maintained by the community, the update URLs to install packages have gone away, or been moved to new locations.

Here’s how to update and fix those older versions of Fedora Linux so you can continue to install packages on them, past their “community expiration” date. I’ll post another entry for the same work for Ubuntu and Debian as well.

In your /etc/yum.repos.d/ directory are a number of configuration files specific to yum and repositories. It’s contents may look something like this:

[root@fedora-fc4 / yum.repos.d]# ls -lart
total 72
drwxr-xr-x  116 root root 12288 Nov 23 22:57 ..
-rw-r--r--    1 root root   344 Nov 24 14:42 fedora-updates-testing.repo
-rw-r--r--    1 root root   336 Nov 24 14:42 fedora-updates.repo
-rw-r--r--    1 root root   305 Nov 24 14:42 fedora-extras.repo
-rw-r--r--    1 root root   319 Nov 24 14:42 fedora-extras-devel.repo
-rw-r--r--    1 root root  1130 Nov 24 14:42 fedora-devel.repo
-rw-r--r--    1 root root   300 Nov 24 14:43 fedora.repo
drwxr-xr-x    2 root root  4096 Nov 24 14:43 .

In the case of Fedora Linux, you’ll want to change each of these so they reflect the new archive site, vs. the original download site, which no longer resolves and does not exist.

The original URL looks like this:

baseurl=http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/core/$releasever/$basearch/os/

You’ll want to edit that to point to the following new URL (highlighted in red below):

baseurl=http://archive.fedoraproject.org/pub/archive/fedora/linux/core/$releasever/$basearch/os/

Once you make these edits to all of the repository files, you can run ‘yum update’ again and fetch all of the legacy update packages, install, remove and keep them as current as those distributions were at that time.

$ sudo yum install git-core
Setting up Install Process
Setting up repositories
updates-released          100% |=========================|  951 B    00:00
extras                    100% |=========================| 1.1 kB    00:00
base                      100% |=========================| 1.1 kB    00:00
Reading repository metadata in from local files
Parsing package install arguments
Resolving Dependencies
--> Populating transaction set with selected packages. Please wait.
---> Downloading header for git-core to pack into transaction set.
git-core-1.4.4.2-2.fc4.x8 100% |=========================|  67 kB    00:00
---> Package git-core.x86_64 0:1.4.4.2-2.fc4 set to be updated
--> Running transaction check

Dependencies Resolved

=============================================================================
 Package                 Arch       Version          Repository        Size
=============================================================================
Installing:
 git-core                x86_64     1.4.4.2-2.fc4    extras            2.9 M

Transaction Summary
=============================================================================
Install      1 Package(s)
Update       0 Package(s)
Remove       0 Package(s)
Total download size: 2.9 M
Is this ok [y/N]: y
Downloading Packages:
(1/1): git-core-1.4.4.2-2 100% |=========================| 2.9 MB    00:05
warning: rpmts_HdrFromFdno: Header V3 DSA signature: NOKEY, key ID 1ac70ce6
public key not available for git-core-1.4.4.2-2.fc4.x86_64.rpm
Retrieving GPG key from file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-fedora-extras
Importing GPG key 0x1AC70CE6 "Fedora Pre Extras Release "
Is this ok [y/N]: y
Key imported successfully
Running Transaction Test
Finished Transaction Test
Transaction Test Succeeded
Running Transaction
  Installing: git-core                     ######################### [1/1]

Installed: git-core.x86_64 0:1.4.4.2-2.fc4
Complete!

Now it works. Good luck!