yum update fails in Fedora 16 because of broken certificates

Today (and also the last days) I ran into trouble when updating my system.\ yum update ran silently in to the error:\

$ sudo yum update -y
Geladene Plugins: auto-update-debuginfo, langpacks, presto, refresh-packagekit
Fehler: Cannot retrieve repository metadata (repomd.xml) for repository:
fedora. Please verify its path and try again

That didn’t tell me a lot about the error, also a yum clean metadata didn’t help.\ After a bit of googling I stumbled across the URLGRABBER_DEBUG variable which tells yum to debug all URL fetching stuff, this lead me to the error:\

$ sudo URLGRABBER_DEBUG=1 yum update -y
Geladene Plugins: auto-update-debuginfo, langpacks, presto, refresh-packagekit
...
Could not get metalink https://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/metalink?
repo=fedora-debug-16&arch=x86_64 error was
14: Peer cert cannot be verified or peer cert invalid
Fehler: Cannot retrieve repository metadata (repomd.xml) for repository: 
fedora. Please verify its path and try again

It was discovered last year that such errors are not passed to the user, but it might be a good idea to fix this.\ To get around the error you can temporarily disable the verification of hosts using yum’s setopt switch:\

$ sudo yum update --setopt=sslverify=false

::: {#footer} [ November 13th, 2011 1:24pm ]{#timestamp} [yum]{.tag} [fedora]{.tag} :::