Problem:
Error: Cannot retrieve metalink for repository: epel. Please verify its path and try again
Faced this error in CentOS 6.3. This issue started after installing the epel-repo
Solution:
You need to update ca-certificates package. Before that disable all the repos with https that are failing.
Here in my case, epel-repo is failing, so I have to disable only epel repo:
yum --disablerepo=epel -y update ca-certificates
The above fix helped me to resolve the issue.