I should probably put a finer point on this.
The recent problem at Netlabs has generally not been one of "up" or "down" in terms of accessibility vs no accessibility of content, but rather the integrity of the repository metadata. YUM (and thus, ANPM, which is only a front end for YUM and WarpIN) reads the metadata (catalog) of the repository and presents a list of packages based on that metadata. Errors parsing the metadata are presented in various ways likely as discussed earlier in this thread (I haven't fully read it), including "cannot find xyz...primary.sqlite" and so forth.
Under normal circumstances, the 2rosenthals.com mirrors simply include the Netlabs metadata when mirroring the repositories, cleaning out any prior mirrored metadata files in the process. When the issue(s) surfaced at Netlabs, it became necessary for us to generate/update/maintain our own metadata unique to the 2rosenthals.com mirrors.
It is entirely possible to have metadata downloaded from the 2rosenthals.com mirrors, select a package for installation, and have that package pulled from either rpm.netlabs.org or
www.2rosenthals.com (if you have the yum fastestmirror plugin installed and enabled, whichever server provides the best response will be chosen for the download). As long as the checksum of the downloaded file matches the one in the metadata for that package, the rpm is accepted as valid for installation. The current "problem," then, only manifests itself when refreshing metadata for the Netlabs repos, because if the metadata is refreshed from rpm.netlabs.org and is broken, errors will occur (the download of a given metadata file will be successful, but the original on the server will likely be corrupt). The rpms themselves change very little, and the current issue at Netlabs seems to be with new files created by the server, not files copied to it or downloaded from it.
So, in summary, note that it may be necessary to remove/comment rpm.netlabs.org from the netlabs-???.repo file in order to have the metadata refresh from the mirror, and then add/uncomment rpm.netlabs.org again for "normal" operation. It is, of course, possible to extend the life of the metadata (i.e., not have it expire as quickly, so it needs refreshing less often). To do this, simply edit yum.conf and look for (or add):
metadata_expire
Time (in seconds)
where
Time is the number of seconds to keep the metadata before refreshing again. The default is 6 hours (see the yum.conf man page). "
never" is a valid value, which means that the metadata must be manually refreshed (and may be a reasonable setting for the time being, until we can be assured that the Netlabs issues have been fully resolved).
