YumRepo Error: All mirror URLs are not using ftp, http[s] or file

Question

I have set up a centOS 6.5 server using VMWare Workstation 9 on a Windows 8.1 host laptop. When trying to use yum to ins

Answer 1

This happened to a system I support on a remote network and I determined it was due to the customer's Check Point firewall interfering with normal HTTP traffic. I ran a sudo tcpdump -nn -c 500 -s0 -X port 80 and watched yum get redirected to some kind of portal:

Location: http://x.x.x.x/UserCheck/PortalMain?....

Funny thing is, it was hard to reproduce with curl, which retrieved the mirror list without any problem. I found I had to add the User-agent: urlgrabber/3.1.0 yum/3.2.22 HTTP header that yum uses to trigger Check Point interfering, like this:

$ curl -i \
    -H 'User-agent: urlgrabber/3.1.0 yum/3.2.22' \
    'http://108.61.16.227/?release=5&arch=x86_64&repo=os'
HTTP/1.1 307 Temporary Redirect
Location: http://x.x.x.x/UserCheck/PortalMain?IID=....origUrl=....
Connection: close

Googling for UserCheck/PortalMain shows this is Check Point Firewall. And the IP I obscured there (x.x.x.x) belonged to the customer. This was sufficient proof to tell the customer he needed to make some kind of change to his firewall to allow my system unobstructed internet access (I have no idea what, but I hope he and/or his network team can figure it out).