I just spent quite awhile chasing down non-solutions for a problem with getting yum to use an http proxy on Fedora Core 5.
It turns out that yum, apparently, ignores environment variables(?) — at least, that’s how it’s behaving here. HTTP_PROXY is set, but yum would not cooperate. No, I was wrong: actually, it is using the environment variables (which it should, so this is a good thing). The reason I thought it was not is that pup (GUI frontend for yum) was still not working… but even with the yum.conf settings below, it is still not working. That’s all right; GUIs can be nice, but as long as it will update, I’m happy.
yum.conf has it’s own syntax for setting a proxy… reasonably enough, you just open /etc/yum.conf and add a line that looks like proxy=http:/yourproxy.
I had been adding :80 at the end, there, since that is the correct port for my particular proxy… but yum didn’t seem to like that. In fact, it complained: urlopen error nonnumeric port: ‘80?’
On a whim, I decided to remove the ‘:80′ (how 80 is nonnumeric, I am still working on) from the end of the proxy setting in yum.conf… and lo and behold, it began to work.
