blacklisting domains for yum?

[Joel Rees]

Looking in the man pages (man-db itself not in the minimal install?
Wow! It's only 1.7M and not having it continually catches someone
off-guard. I'm sure I'm not going to remember this next time I do a
minimal install.) for yum, not finding a way to black-list domains.

What I'm trying to do, the chinese servers get read early in the
rotation, and they were dogs last night. 1KB/s and slowing down. Not
sure if it's the censoring they are shooting themselves in the foot
with or the line between here and there or overloading on a Friday
night (Porn on the back channels? highly probable in totalitarian and
near-totalitarian countries.) or what. Don't care. I don't trust any
server in China right now, and I have reason not to right now, other
than simple prejudice. (Such as baidu ignoring my no robots
directives.)

So I want to block yum from going to any domain in .cn .

Is there an easy way to do it, either in yum.conf or in yum.repos.d/*
, short of disabling the metalinks and grabbing the list of mirrors
from the mirrors page and deleting the Chinese servers?

(Or setting my own mirrors list up and refreshing it periodically from
mirrors.fedoraproject.org, deleting the Chinese servers as I refresh
them. That would be a lot of work, too.)

--
Joel Rees

[Joel Rees]

On Wed, Jan 2, 2013 at 10:31 AM, Ed Greshko <Ed.Greshko(a)greshko.com&gt; wrote:
>  On 01/02/2013 08:19 AM, Joel Rees wrote:
> > On Tue, Jan 1, 2013 at 8:57 PM, Tim <ignored_mailbox(a)yahoo.com.au&gt; wrote:
> >> Allegedly, on or about 29 December 2012, Joel Rees sent:
> >>> I'm beginning to think the ISP has throttled me for yum.
> >> Could just be the time of the year, with more traffic than usual.
> > Definitely a possibility, particularly considering the timing. New
> > Year's morning here was impossible.
> >
> > But not for the whole net.
> >
> > Read in the newspapers there were some attacks in progress in the
> > Chinese segment around that time, so that might have also been part of
> > it.
>
>  I live in Taiwan and work with folks in China.  No problems for me to connect and
> transfer files.  Also, my wife watches streaming video from China and she has had no
> problems during the times you were citing.  I avoided making any comments at that time
> since this lists isn't a forum for political or country bashing.  Even though they may
> not comment on this list, please note that folks in countries being bashed do read this
> list and some of them may take offense.
>  
Thanks for the different point of view.

I should have been specific about the attacks being "cyber attacks" or
"internet attacks", but I didn't read the articles, just the
headlines, so, who knows?

Mea culpa. I'll look for the articles in the old newspaper pile if
you're interested in what was being said.

BTW, did you try pulling down updates on the 29th to 31st after about 11:00 pm?

All I know for sure is that yum on my netbook kept getting hung up
trying to read repositories on Chinese mirrors, so I installed
fastestmirror and blocked .cn domains, and that seemed to help.

It's the only box I have that runs Fedora right now.

apt-get on my Debian systems had no issues, neither was there any
particular problem getting to websites. Different set of mirrors. The
Fedora mirrors in China that seemed to hang me up were all university
mirrors. Possibilities that crossed my mind was that students were
celebrating on the 'net or that the government's filters were hard at
work against the universities. Saw the headlines the next day and
assumed there had been DOS and other attacks going on.

--
Joel Rees

[Ed Greshko]

On 01/02/2013 08:19 AM, Joel Rees wrote:
>  On Tue, Jan 1, 2013 at 8:57 PM, Tim
> <ignored_mailbox(a)yahoo.com.au&gt; wrote:
> > Allegedly, on or about 29 December 2012, Joel Rees sent:
> >> I'm beginning to think the ISP has throttled me for yum.
> > Could just be the time of the year, with more traffic than usual.
>  Definitely a possibility, particularly considering the timing. New
>  Year's morning here was impossible.
>
>  But not for the whole net.
>
>  Read in the newspapers there were some attacks in progress in the
>  Chinese segment around that time, so that might have also been part of
>  it. 
I live in Taiwan and work with folks in China.  No problems for me to connect and transfer
files.  Also, my wife watches streaming video from China and she has had no problems
during the times you were citing.  I avoided making any comments at that time since this
lists isn't a forum for political or country bashing.  Even though they may not
comment on this list, please note that folks in countries being bashed do read this list
and some of them may take offense.


-- 
Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better
idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far,
the Universe is winning. -- Rick Cook, The Wizardry Compiled

[Joel Rees]

On Tue, Jan 1, 2013 at 8:57 PM, Tim <ignored_mailbox(a)yahoo.com.au&gt; wrote:
>  Allegedly, on or about 29 December 2012, Joel Rees sent:
> > I'm beginning to think the ISP has throttled me for yum.
>
>  Could just be the time of the year, with more traffic than usual. 
Definitely a possibility, particularly considering the timing. New
Year's morning here was impossible.

But not for the whole net.

Read in the newspapers there were some attacks in progress in the
Chinese segment around that time, so that might have also been part of
it.

--
Joel Rees

[Mika Suomalainen]

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On 29.12.2012 01:07, Joel Rees wrote:
>  So I want to block yum from going to any domain in .cn .
>  
>  Is there an easy way to do it, either in yum.conf or in
>  yum.repos.d/* , short of disabling the metalinks and grabbing the
>  list of mirrors from the mirrors page and deleting the Chinese
>  servers? 
I think that yum-plugin-fastestmirror can do this.
/etc/yum/pluginconf.d/fastestmirror.conf has commented line 11 which
says "#exclude=.gov, facebook" and I believe that it means that it
will not use mirrors that end with .gov or facebook.

yum install yum-plugin-fastestmirror

- -- 
Mika Suomalainen
http://mkaysi.github.com/
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[Joel Rees]

On Sat, Dec 29, 2012 at 7:58 PM, Mika Suomalainen <mkaysi(a)outlook.com&gt; wrote:
>  -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
>  Hash: SHA512
>
>  On 29.12.2012 01:07, Joel Rees wrote:
> > So I want to block yum from going to any domain in .cn .
> >
> > Is there an easy way to do it, either in yum.conf or in
> > yum.repos.d/* , short of disabling the metalinks and grabbing the
> > list of mirrors from the mirrors page and deleting the Chinese
> > servers?
>
>  I think that yum-plugin-fastestmirror can do this.
>  /etc/yum/pluginconf.d/fastestmirror.conf has commented line 11 which
>  says "#exclude=.gov, facebook" and I believe that it means that it
>  will not use mirrors that end with .gov or facebook. 
Apparently that's ends in .gov or includes facebook.

>  yum install yum-plugin-fastestmirror 
But now I have it installed, yum is still dragging through a sandpit.
Speeds in the range of 1 kb/s I'm beginning to think the ISP has
throttled me for yum.

yum was slow like this late last night and almost normal speed during
the day today. Kind of like the servers are getting hit, but the
servers seem okay via direct http or ftp.

--
Joel Rees

[Joel Rees]

On Sat, Dec 29, 2012 at 8:24 AM, Tom Horsley <horsley1953(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote:
>  I know you can do it with the yum-plugin-fastestmirror plugin.
>  /etc/yum/pluginconf.d/fastestmirror.conf has some comments
>  about how to prevent access to certain mirrors.
>
>  In that same directory is a blacklist.conf file, but
>  there are no comments in it so I have no idea what it
>  might blacklist. (It is apparently installed by the
>  anaconda-yum-plugins rpm). 
That's the package I want.

Thanks.

(If the new government in China relaxes its attempts at controlling
the internet and territorial expansionism, I would not want to do
this, but for the time being, it's very useful.)

--
Joel Rees

[Tim]

Allegedly, on or about 29 December 2012, Joel Rees sent:
>  I'm beginning to think the ISP has throttled me for yum. 
Could just be the time of the year, with more traffic than usual.

-- 
[tim@localhost ~]$ uname -rsvp
Linux 3.6.10-2.fc17.x86_64 #1 SMP Tue Dec 11 18:07:34 UTC 2012 x86_64

All mail to my mailbox is automatically deleted, there is no point
trying to privately email me, I will only read messages posted to the
public lists.

[Tom Horsley]

I know you can do it with the yum-plugin-fastestmirror plugin.
/etc/yum/pluginconf.d/fastestmirror.conf has some comments
about how to prevent access to certain mirrors.

In that same directory is a blacklist.conf file, but
there are no comments in it so I have no idea what it
might blacklist. (It is apparently installed by the
anaconda-yum-plugins rpm).