morgan@morgansmachine:~$ ssh admin@frontserver
Web console: https://frontserver.lan:9090/ or https://192.168.0.20:9090/
Last login: Tue Mar 14 22:52:31 2023 from ::ffff:192.168.0.140
[admin@frontserver ~]$ echo hello world
hello world
[admin@frontserver ~]$
The answer was to track down the IPs of all the base URLs in the repos and use sed to swap them for the domain names - manual dns…
[edit: And, adding sslverify=false to /etc/yum.conf else ssl certification will cause dnf to spit the dummy on IPs.]