FYI: Workaround for today's FC5 baseurl/mirrorlist problems

Ralf Corsepius rc040203 at freenet.de
Thu Oct 26 01:54:21 UTC 2006


On Wed, 2006-10-25 at 21:34 +0530, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
> Ralf Corsepius wrote:
> > On Wed, 2006-10-25 at 18:40 +0530, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
> >> Joshua Andrews wrote:
> >>
> >>> Thank you Jef.
> >>>
> >>> I must say that this is a really big piece of shit! Maybe a simple yum 
> >>> update could have solved this problem for thousands of people!!!!!! Maybe?
> >> It wont. Since you wont be able to get that update without the mirror 
> >> list working.
> > 
> > If yum had a better mirrorlist selection algorithm, this issue would not
> > have appeared ;)
> 
> Mirror list selection is a server side infrastructure issue. 

Wrong, it's a yum design flaw. 

E.g. if the mirrorlist file was on a local disc, yum would not try to
contact the mirrorlist on the server each time it is being invoked.

The work around from RH's side would be pretty easy: Ship a local copy
of the mirrorlist file as an rpm and let yum use this. Then update this
rpm at regular intervals.

> > And if yum had a counter part to "apt-get update" the network load would
> > be less, which would make server overloads and DOS/QOS attacks less
> > successful.
> 
> yum update = apt-get update

Very oversimplified yes.

The difference is in "remove / install"
yum contacts the mirror server each time anew on each invocation,
apt-get doesn't

Try a dialon-demand dialup over a modem and you'll pretty soon notice
why I consider yum to be a "network connection hog"

Ralf





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