EPEL Repo for CentOS 6 causing error

Solution 1:

The correct fix is to update your SSL certificates.

sudo yum upgrade ca-certificates --disablerepo=epel

You need to disable the epel repo so that this command will succeed. After you update your certificates you can use yum normally as EPEL will work again.

Solution 2:

I had this problem, and it boiled down to the SSL certificate not being verifiable when getting the updated metalink file for EPEL via HTTPS. I suppose that I could have drilled down through the certificate chain to find out why, but in order to get my server working again, I sidestepped the problem by adding the following line into /etc/yum.repos.d/epel.repo:

[epel]
...
sslverify=false

I didn't think this was insanely unsafe, because the packages themselves are still verified by GPG-signature check.

Solution 3:

You can modify the epel repo to use http instead of https by running the following as root/sudo

sed -i "s/mirrorlist=https/mirrorlist=http/" /etc/yum.repos.d/epel.repo

Solution 4:

Ridiculously using secure HTTP is causing a problem yet normal HTTP is working fine. This shouldn't be happening with a fresh install so there must be an issue with Fedora's repositories. It's working now.