My Problem:

Attempting to install an RPM using the rpm -i command causes a series of errors:

error: open of <!DOCTYPE failed: No such file or directory
error: open of HTML failed: No such file or directory
error: open of PUBLIC failed: No such file or directory

The shell may hang and not return control to you.

It looks like it’s trying to parse an HTML document as a series of commands. Let’s think about that for a moment, shall we?

The Solution:

You are not attempting to install an rpm file, you are attempting to install a web page. Most likely either a redirect or 404 error page. Don’t believe me? Use cat to view the rpm file. In my case, trying to install rpmforge as a repo, I used curl to get what I thought was the proper rpm, however in reality I was retrieving the following:

$ cat rpmforge-release-0.5.2-2.el5.rf.x86_64.rpm
 
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//IETF//DTD HTML 2.0//EN">
<html><head>
<title>302 Found</title>
</head><body>
<h1>Found</h1>
<p>The document has moved <a href="http://rpmforge.sw.be/redhat/el5/en/x86_64/rpmforge/RPMS/rpmforge-release-0.5.2-2.el5.rf.x86_64.rpm">here</a>.</p>
<hr>
<address>Apache/2.2.3 (Red Hat) Server at pkgs.repoforge.org Port 80</address>
</body></html>

Once you find the proper RPM file, I’m sure the installation will proceed without a hitch.