Resolving EPEL 404 errors (yum errno 14)

posted Jun 8, 2015 | about 1 minute to read

Today, I ran into an interesting issue with yum where I was unable to contact EPEL repository mirrors – every mirror was throwing “filelists.sqlite.xz: [Errno 14] HTTP Error 404 – Not Found”. I tried uninstalling and reinstalling the epel-release package, but that didn’t help. It turns out that this issue is caused by cached data in yum and can sometimes happen when repos update. The one-line command that fixed the issue for me was simply yum clean dbcache metadata _– _once I ran that, yum pulled the proper database from an EPEL mirror and I was back in business.

Since I’ve only had to do this once so far, I’m not treating it as a recurring issue yet. If it returns, though, David Abdemoulaie has a fix on his blog which I imagine would work, which involves explicitly excluding the mirror that is causing the inconsistency.