[CentOS-devel] New mirrorlist update system for CentOS

Johnny Hughes johnny at centos.org
Sun Feb 12 21:48:13 UTC 2006


We have finished setting up, and now are putting into testing, a new
update system.  Lance Davis did much hard work getting this ready, and
the rest of the team did a lot of work in testing it ... thanks to
everyone involved.

This system is unlike any other I have seen, in that it polls external
mirrors and only assigns mirrors that have been verified in the latest
pass.  It also assigns mirrors using Geo-IP and the IP address of the
connecting client, so you should only get verified and geographically
close mirrors.

This also allows for 10 mirrors for each repo, which means that you
should have failover capability (something else the old rrdns system
lacked).

Also released is the fastestmirror yum plugin with proxy server
detection (thanks to Karanbir Singh for proxy server detection patch). 

The fastestserver and protectbase yum plugins have been removed from the
yum-utils package so that either of them can be installed separately.

Rounding out the list is a new yum version that is an upgrade from the
upstream provider.

This should greatly increase the reliability of CentOS upgrades,
especially during point releases, where we had a major issue for days
last cycle.

Here are the new RPMs in testing:

centos-yumconf-4-4.4.noarch.rpm
yum-2.4.2-1.centos4.noarch.rpm
yum-plugin-fastestmirror-0.2.4-2.c4.noarch.rpm
yum-plugin-protectbase-1.1-1.c4.noarch.rpm
yum-updateonboot-0.5-1.c4.noarch.rpm
yum-utils-0.5-1.c4.noarch.rpm

You can install only the RPMS to test new system by using the command:

yum --enable c4-testing install centos-yumconf yum yum-plugin-fastestmirror

(fastest mirror is optional ... but will increase your performance)

If you don't have the testing repository installed, you can get
the .repo file from

http://dev.centos.org/centos/4/CentOS-Testing.repo

and put it in /etc/yum.repo.d/

There is a tracker setup here for reporting feedback. Please provide
both positive and negative install info, as we need positive reports to
move items from testing to stable:

http://bugs.centos.org/view.php?id=1211

-------------------------
Notes:

1.  Please read the README.centos concerning plugin setup if you install
any plugins (in /usr/share/doc/#NAME_OF_PLUGIN#, specifically you have
to add the following to /etc/yum.conf to make yum plugins work:

plugins=1

2.  If you have modified your /etc/yum.repo.d/CentOS-Base.repo file, you
will get a new file called:

CentOS-Base.repo.rpmnew

In order to use the new system, you need to replace CentOS-Base.repo
with CentOS-Base.repo.rpmnew

Thanks,
Johnny Hughes

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