I’ve been using Ubuntu Server for a while now, on various Microsoft Azure or Amazon Web Services (AWS) EC2 instances, and the experience has been pretty awesome. I recently spun up a RedHat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 7.3 instance on AWS EC2. RedHat 7.3 was just released about a week ago from today. One of the first things I did was attempt to use the yum package management system, as I wanted to install Git, Vim 8.0, and some other packages.
On Ubuntu Server, I’m accustomed to running apt search <SearchTerm>, to locate a relevant package. When I tried running yum search git on RedHat 7.3, I got back some nasty error messages, that initially looked like they were network-related. Thankfully, as usual, Google searches revealed that I was far from the only person who ran into these error messages.
[ec2-user@ip-10-0-121-215 ~]$ yum search git Loaded plugins: amazon-id, rhui-lb, search-disabled-repos Repo rhui-REGION-client-config-server-7 forced skip_if_unavailable=True due to: /etc/pki/rhui/cdn.redhat.com-chain.crt Repo rhui-REGION-client-config-server-7 forced skip_if_unavailable=True due to: /etc/pki/rhui/product/rhui-client-config-server-7.crt Repo rhui-REGION-client-config-server-7 forced skip_if_unavailable=True due to: /etc/pki/rhui/rhui-client-config-server-7.key Repo rhui-REGION-rhel-server-releases forced skip_if_unavailable=True due to: /etc/pki/rhui/cdn.redhat.com-chain.crt Repo rhui-REGION-rhel-server-releases forced skip_if_unavailable=True due to: /etc/pki/rhui/product/content-rhel7.crt Repo rhui-REGION-rhel-server-releases forced skip_if_unavailable=True due to: /etc/pki/rhui/content-rhel7.key Repo rhui-REGION-rhel-server-rh-common forced skip_if_unavailable=True due to: /etc/pki/rhui/cdn.redhat.com-chain.crt Repo rhui-REGION-rhel-server-rh-common forced skip_if_unavailable=True due to: /etc/pki/rhui/product/content-rhel7.crt Repo rhui-REGION-rhel-server-rh-common forced skip_if_unavailable=True due to: /etc/pki/rhui/content-rhel7.key Could not contact CDS load balancer rhui2-cds01.us-east-1.aws.ce.redhat.com, trying others. Could not contact any CDS load balancers: rhui2-cds01.us-east-1.aws.ce.redhat.com, rhui2-cds02.us-east-1.aws.ce.redhat.com.
Apparently, unlike apt, the yum package manager requires that you run its search command as root. The error messages are incredibly unhelpful in terms of finding that out. Solving the problem, at least for me, was literally as easy as running sudo yum search git. Hope this helps someone!
