I was trying to connect to RHN from Yum/up2date in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5. I kept getting fatal invalid SSL cert errors. The strange part – out of all of the machines I tested it was only occuring on a single RHEL 5 laptop. The really strange part – it was happening on the host as well as inside a guest in a VM running in VMware Player.

If you get this:


[root@rhel5-vm ~]# yum search openoffice
Loading "rhnplugin" plugin
Loading "installonlyn" plugin
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/usr/bin/yum", line 29, in ?
yummain.main(sys.argv[1:])
File "/usr/share/yum-cli/yummain.py", line 85, in main
base.getOptionsConfig(args)
File "/usr/share/yum-cli/cli.py", line 199, in getOptionsConfig
errorlevel=opts.errorlevel)
File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/yum/__init__.py", line 134, in doConfigSetup
self.plugins.run('init')
File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/yum/plugins.py", line 153, in run
func(conduitcls(self, self.base, conf, **kwargs))
File "/usr/lib/yum-plugins/rhnplugin.py", line 88, in init_hook
login_info = up2dateAuth.getLoginInfo()
File "/usr/share/rhn/up2date_client/up2dateAuth.py", line 139, in getLoginInfo
login()
File "/usr/share/rhn/up2date_client/up2dateAuth.py", line 98, in login
li = server.up2date.login(systemId)
File "/usr/share/rhn/up2date_client/rhnserver.py", line 64, in __call__
raise up2dateErrors.SSLCertificateVerifyFailedError()
up2date_client.up2dateErrors.SSLCertificateVerifyFailedError: The SSL certificate failed verification.


Check the date/time on the machine. Mine was a VM syncing w/ a host clock with a bad CMOS battery. Caused it to think it was 2005 and the cert wasn’t valid yet. Also explains why it happened in both host and guest.