[chef] strategies to prevent chef-client bomb out due to yum error?

hi. this keeps happening to me lately. in various places in my cookbooks,
i'll yum install an rpm. sometimes the process bombs out because it gets
a 503 response from http://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/. contacting that
server only happens for the epel repo.

is this happening to anyone else? how do you solve it?

one solution might be to mirror that repo locally, but i really don't
want to.

maybe another solution would be to disable this line in epel.repo:

mirrorlist=http://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/mirrorlist?repo=epel-debug-5&arch=$basearch

and enable this line?

baseurl=http://download.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/5/$basearch/debug


is it a good idea for the package or yum_package provider to help with
this? then again, maybe not because the point of cfg mgmt here is for
a node to be in a known and intended state. and if it can't get there,
then it's a "bad" node, and the chef-client run should fail..


and here's how it happens:

package "perl-YAML" do
  action :install
end

[Wed, 21 Mar 2012 21:19:57 +0000] WARN: Problem parsing line 'Could not 
retrieve mirrorlist 
http://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/mirrorlist?repo=epel-5&arch=x86_64 error ;
was' from yum-dump.py! Please check your yum configuration.
[Wed, 21 Mar 2012 21:19:57 +0000] WARN: Problem parsing line '[Errno 14] HTTP 
Error 503: SERVICE UNAVAILABLE' from yum-dump.py! Please check your yum 
configuration.
[Wed, 21 Mar 2012 21:19:57 +0000] DEBUG: Re-raising exception: 
Chef::Exceptions::Package - package[perl-YAML] (toolbin::default line 12) had 
an error: Yum
 failed - #<Process::Status: pid=1992,exited(1)> - returns: yum-dump 
Repository Error: Cannot find a valid baseurl for repo: epel



thanks!
kallen