What's up with fastestmirror?

[Patrick O'Callaghan]

I have a slow (1Mbps) connection at home, so I'm keen to reduce yum
update times. The fastestmirror plugin ought to be good for someone like
me, but I can't discover any rationale for how it's supposed to work.
This is not helped by the complete absence of documentation.

For example, I explicitly exclude the .br TLD since FM thinks Brazil is
close to Venezuela where I live. However networkologically they aren't
that close, and downloads from the Brazil mirror(s) general go at 20Kbps
or less. So the weighting algorithm is demonstrably wrong. I've actually
brought this up before on the list, but I don't remember BZing it. My
mistake.

Anyway, despite this explicit exclusion, yum insists on trying to
download from a Brazil mirror. In fact today it wanted to update json-c
and decided to use Brazil, however there was a connection problem so the
update failed. Several retries gave the same result.

I then disabled fastestmirror completely and tried again. The update
completed instantly. So I guess I'll be leaving fastestmirror turned off
from now on.

poc