yum hangs on OCI Linux (8.6)

If I run any yum command on a free tier Linux 8 instance on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), the commands hang indefinitely. For example:

yum install gcc-c++
yum update

There is no choice but to kill the process id for this process:

root@dev:/root> yum update
^C^C^C^CKilled

Solution Attempt #1

It seems that the yum clean all command helped, as I got some progress:

root@dev:/root> yum clean all
32 files removed

root@dev:/root> yum install gcc-c++
Ksplice for Oracle Linux 8 (x86_64) 18 MB/s | 7.3 MB 00:00
MySQL 8.0 for Oracle Linux 8 (x86_64) 13 MB/s | 3.8 MB 00:00
MySQL 8.0 Tools Community for Oracle Linux 8 (x86_64) 4.5 MB/s | 636 kB 00:00
MySQL 8.0 Connectors Community for Oracle Linux 8 (x86_64) 176 kB/s | 30 kB 00:00
Oracle Software for OCI users on Oracle Linux 8 (x86_64) 35 MB/s | 136 MB 00:03

...but it eventually hangs again here...

Analysis

Under the yum repos folder in /etc/yum.repos.d, there are multiple .repo files. I was able to confirm that the hanging "Oracle Software for OCI users" update step was associated with the repo filename oci-included-ol8.repo:

root@dev:/etc/yum.repos.d> ll
total 36
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root  382 Mar  8 03:51 hashicorp.repo
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root  495 May  4  2021 ksplice-ol8.repo
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root  759 Apr 12  2021 mysql-ol8.repo
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root  253 Mar 19  2021 oci-included-ol8.repo
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root  530 Aug 24  2022 oracle-epel-ol8.repo
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root  694 Aug 24  2022 oraclelinux-developer-ol8.repo
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root 3439 Aug 24  2022 oracle-linux-ol8.repo
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root  941 Jun 30  2022 uek-ol8.repo
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root  243 Jun 30  2022 virt-ol8.repo

Final Solution

I deleted this file, and that seemed to do the trick:

root@dev:/etc/yum.repos.d> rm oci-included-ol8.repo
rm: remove regular file 'oci-included-ol8.repo'? y

The contents of this file are shown here. I don't know for sure whether this repo is simply unavailable or experiencing momentary issues:

[ol8_oci_included]
name=Oracle Software for OCI users on Oracle Linux $releasever ($basearch)
baseurl=https://yum$ociregion.$ocidomain/repo/OracleLinux/OL8/oci/included/$basearch/
gpgkey=file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-oracle
gpgcheck=1
enabled=1

Addressing Yum Hanging Issues

There are multiple other attempts I could have explored to help with the hanging issue, but fortunately I did not require them.

For reference, some of the commands that I would have attempted had the solution above not worked include:

yum clean all
yum clean metadata
rpm --rebuilddb
yum list all
yum update

Perhaps I could even consider running an strace to see where the process is hanging:

strace yum --verbose --noplugins info

References: