Josh Wieder

A few of my Red Hat servers run cron jobs to check for updates. starting yesterday (Thursday October 1st, 2015) at around 3PM I encountered 503 unavailable errors when attempting to contact a Fedora Project URL that hosts the metalink for the  rhui-REGION-rhel-server-releases repository - a core RHEL repository for EC2. Could not get metalink  https://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/metalink?repo=epel-7&arch=x86_64  error was 14: HTTPS Error 503 - Service Unavailable 3 hours later or so, the URL began responding again, but the problems remained. `yum` now reports corrupted update announcements from the repo: Update notice RHSA-2014:0679 (from rhui-REGION-rhel-server-releases) is broken, or a bad duplicate, skipping. You should report this problem to the owner of the rhui-REGION-rhel-server-releases repository. Update notice RHSA-2014:1327 (from rhui-REGION-rhel-server-releases) is broken, or a bad duplicate, skipping. Update notice RHEA-2015:0372 (from rhui-REG...

So last night (11-12-14) or this morning you ran a package of `Important` Windows Cumulative Security Updates. Gee those do sound important! There were about 11 or so - specifically, the ones most likely to give you trouble are these: Update for Windows 7 for x64-based Systems (KB3008627) Security Update for Windows 7 for x64-based Systems (KB3003743) Security Update for Windows 7 for x64-based Systems (KB2993958) Security Update for Windows 7 for x64-based Systems (KB2991963) Security Update for Windows 7 for x64-based Systems (KB3005607) Security Update for Windows 7 for x64-based Systems (KB2992611) Security Update for Windows 7 for x64-based Systems (KB3010788) Security Update for Windows 7 for x64-based Systems (KB3002885) Security Update for Windows 7 for x64-based Systems (KB3006226) After diligently downloading and installing these updates, you allow your computer to reboot. The boot process goes smoothly, you log into your computer, only to find a stark black s...

Sigh.