Comments on the fastestmirror plugin

[Robert Nichols]

On 03/12/2010 08:08 AM, Patrick O'Callaghan wrote:
> The yum fastestmirror plugin (yum-plugin-fastestmirror) claims to
> evaluate the speed of a bunch of repo mirrors and use the fastest one
> relative to the user's location.
>
> However AFAIK what it *actually* does is make a test connection to the
> to the candidate mirrors and order them according to response time,
> which in many cases is dominated by network latency, which can distort
> the results. For well-connected user machines in first-world countries
> it probably doesn't matter much, and may have the beneficial effect of
> spreading the load over a wider range of mirrors, but for those of us in
> a less privileged position it can matter a lot. Ironically, these are
> the cases where such an optimization could do the most good.
>
> A case in point: I live in Venezuela and on several recent occasions yum
> decided that my closest repo was in Puerto Rico, which as the packet
> flies is probably true. However the b/w I got as a result was around 2
> or 3kbps.

If there are particular hosts or domains you want to avoid, you can edit
/etc/yum/pluginconf.d/fastestmirror.conf and add an "exclude" line.
There is a commented-out sample exclude line at the bottom of that file:

          #exclude=.gov, facebook

-- 
Bob Nichols     "NOSPAM" is really part of my email address.
                 Do NOT delete it.