I'm new to Fedora and am running Fedora 44 KDE on a Dell Precision 5570. Whenever I run `sudo dnf upgrade --refresh`, the process fails while downloading the Cisco OpenH264 package. The error says that `ciscobinary.openh264.org` cannot be resolved and that all mirrors were tried. Pings and `nslookup` also fail, with the local DNS resolver returning `REFUSED`, while Fedora, RPM Fusion, Brave, and VS Code repositories work normally. The download succeeds when I switch from my regular Wi-Fi to my phone's hotspot. Is this caused by a temporary Cisco server problem, DNS configuration, network filtering, or regional restrictions on the OpenH264 repository?
1 Answer
This is a known issue with Cisco’s OpenH264 download service. The host appears to apply geographic or IP-based blocking, so users in certain countries or on certain networks may receive a DNS refusal even though other repositories work. Switching to a different connection changes your public IP and can bypass the restriction, which explains why the phone hotspot worked.
That makes sense. The regular Wi-Fi and phone hotspot use different public IP addresses, so Cisco’s service or an upstream DNS provider may treat them differently. It explains why only the OpenH264 package failed while the other repositories remained available.