I have a machine which is not connected to the internet. I still want to execute some yum commands from time to time.
YUM does like to update the mirrorlist every so often, resulting in errors like:
Could not retrieve mirrorlist http://mirrorlist.centos.org/?release=6&arch=x86_64&repo=os error was' from yum-dump.py! Please check your yum configuration.
Is there a parameter in yum.conf or elsewhere to make yum stop updating the mirrorlist?
You can use -C flag in yum. As per YUM's man page:
-C, --cacheonly
Tells yum to run entirely from system cache - does not
download or update any headers unless it has to to perform the
requested action. If you’re using this as a user yum will not
use the tempcache for the user but will only use the system cache in
the system cachedir.
and also please check this question
I believe this behavior is governed by this parameter:
metadata_expire
Duration in seconds after which the metadata will expire. So if the current metadata downloaded is some seconds younger, then yum will not update the repository metadata. If you think that yum is not downloading the update information as often as you wish, reduce the value of this parameter. You can also change the default format in seconds to days, hours or minutes adding d,h or m to the specified value. The default is 1.5 hours, for running yum-updatesd every hour. You can also use the word never meaning that the metadata will never expire.
So I'd try either a 0d, -1, or set the value to something that's really long, 1000d (1000 days).
metadata_expire=99999999
You can then update the cache when you do have access to the internet:
$ sudo yum makecache
metadata_expire=never and uses the yum-plugin-refresh-updatesd package to check for updates or even the yum-makecache.service? The /etc/yum.conf file hints at this: > It is esp. important, to have correct metadata, for > distributions like > # Fedora which don't keep old packages around. If you > don't like this checking > # interupting your command line usage, it's much better > to have something > # manually check the metadata once an hour (yum-updatesd will do this).
Commented
Jun 17, 2014 at 11:06
mirrorlist_expire and metadata_expire to a high value. This solved the problem for me. Thanks a lot
Besides the idea of changing the metadata age, you can simply remove the configuration for the repositories which are not reachable. Yum does not need configured repositories to work properly - it can actually run with no configured repository at all. In such case, you are of course bound to only work with packages you have locally installed.
If you have more than one machine cut off from the Internet, it might make sense to create an internal mirror of the CentOS repos and point yum towards these.
