2019-09-19

Attention: Fedora Yahoo Email Users

Going from a blast of the past we are currently going through one of the Yahoo is not allowing many emails with either fedoraproject.org OR from our mail routers.  It would seem that the way to get yahoo to blacklist a domain is to get subscribed to mailing lists and then report the lists as SPAM. Enough accounts (or maybe if one person does it enough times).. yahoo will helpfully blacklist the domain completely. [It then is usually a multi-month process of people explaining that no Fedora is not a spam site, hasn't been taken over by a spam site, or a bunch of other things which do happen so any mail admin is going to be wary on.]

The funny thing is that their blockage doesn't work 100% so some people seem to still get emails delivered even when most of our logs show that yahoo is telling our servers various SMTP errors of GO AWAY.

At this point, if you are a packager with a yahoo.com email address, you probably have not gotten an email from any lists or possibly bugzilla for a bit. Trying to email you directly from our site to tell you this isn't going to work.. so we are going back to blogs on the hopes that someone still reads them.


2019-09-16

EPEL Bug: Bash errors on recent EL-8 systems.

Last week, I got asked about a problem with using EPEL-8 on Oracle Enterprise Linux 8 where trying to install packages failed due to bad license file. I duplicated the problem on RHEL-8 which had not happened before some recent updates.

[smooge@localhost ~]$ repoquery
bash: repoquery: command not found...
Failed to search for file: Failed to download gpg key for repo 'epel': Curl error (37): Couldn't read a file:// file for file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-EPEL-8.0 [Couldn't open file /etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-EPEL-8.0]
The problem seems to be that the EPEL release package uses the string $releasever for various short-cut strings. Take for example:

[epel-playground]
name=Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux $releasever - Playground - $basearch
#baseurl=https://download.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/playground/$releasever/Everything/$basearch/os
metalink=https://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/metalink?repo=playground-epel$releasever&arch=$basearch&infra=$infra&content=$contentdir
failovermethod=priority
enabled=0
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-EPEL-$releasever

The problem is that when I wrote new versions of the EPEL-8 repo file, I replaced the old key phrase gpgkey=file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-EPEL-7 with gpgkey=file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-EPEL-$releasever .  When I tested things with the dnf command it worked fine but I didn't check to see where things like bash completion would show up.

Moving back to the format that EPEL-6 and EPEL-7 used fixes the problem, so I will be pushing an updated release file out this week.  My apologies for people seeing the errors.