blacklist mirrors?

[Kam Leo]

On Sat, Apr 11, 2009 at 8:24 AM, Sharpe, Sam J
<sam.sharpe+lists.redhat at gmail.com> wrote:
> 2009/4/11 Kam Leo <kam.leo at gmail.com>:
>> On Sat, Apr 11, 2009 at 7:50 AM, Tom Horsley <tom.horsley at att.net> wrote:
>>> I was just poking around in the available yum plugins and I
>>> didn't see one for blacklisting mirrors. Is there something
>>> that will allow me to do that, and I just didn't recognize
>>> it from the description?
>>>
>>> I'm basically ready to give up on mirrors.liberty.edu since
>>> yum keeps trying to use it, timing out, and picking a different
>>> mirror. I'd like to tell it to stop wasting time ever
>>> trying that particular mirror (don't know if it is a problem
>>> with that mirror or just the path from here to there).
>>>
>>
>> Tom, get with the program and do a little reading. Edit your repo
>> file(s) and change the baseurl to point to the server you want to use.
>
> What the heck? That's a pretty rude response and hard-coding a
> particular mirror is not the preferred method, because mirrors are
> considered ephemeral.
>
> Tom, I use yum-fastestmirror - it may do what you want by sticking you
> to a much faster mirror than the liberty.edu one.
>
> --
> Sam

My appologies to Tom and this list if my reply seemed to be rude.
However, Tom is not a newbie. He's been using Fedora since at least
FC5. Here are some points I want to make in no particular order.

Fedora releases are ephemera, too.

Mirrorslist is a good way to distribute the load. Unfortunately as a
user you do not get the ability to specify quality over speed when you
use a mirrors list. If there is a mechanism for determining the
quality/stablity of a mirror Fedora infrastructure must be performing
it behind the scenes.

Does fastestmirror plugin just use ping time to rank mirrors? Anyone
have knowledge as to how the fastestmirror plugin quantifies mirrors?
It is there a quality of service metric built into the fastestmirror
plugin?

[Side note: Smart package manager. at present, does not accept a
mirrorslist. It does however, perform a test of enabled repositories
and selects the fastest.]

Why use mirrorslist if you are a long time Fedora user, know of and
use specific and reliable Fedora mirror(s)?

Yum accepts multiple entries in the baseurl. (It also accepts multiple
baseurls, but that is not how to properly configure the utility.) Put
your preferred mirror first in the list, a fallback second, etc. Yum
also accepts multiple repositories. As an alternative you can create a
.repo file for your preferred mirror.

A long term Fedora user should to do a "man yum.conf" to learn about
configuring yum. Its feature set keeps growing with each upgrade.

Info at the Duke yum site is very sparse. Pointers as to where
configuration and usage of the various yum-utils and yum-<plugin> can
be found would be greatly appreciated.