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