All,

In an effort to better distribute files for our users, we have been working with some of the yum-utils-plugins from the yum website. Specifically, we have done some work with protectbase and fastestmirror.

Here is the wiki concerning yum plugins:

http://wiki.linux.duke.edu/YumPlugins

We are currently testing these plugins, and they seem to work well. After a couple weeks of testing, we will move these into the main CentOS tree.

Attached is the readme file for the new yum-utils-plugins RPM.

If you want to test these plugins, they are currently in the dev.centos.org testing repo ... do this to test:

1. Download the file repo file and put it in /etc/yum.repos.d/ http://dev.centos.org/centos/4/CentOS-Testing.repo

2. Install yum-utils and yum-utils-plugins with this command:

yum --enable=c4-testing install yum-utils yum-utils-plugins

3. Enable plugins in yum by editing the file /etc/yum.conf and adding this line:

plugins=1

4. To use the protectbase plugin, edit your repos in /etc/yum.repo.d/ and add the following lines to repos you wish to protect (ie, the Official CentOS repos):

protect=1

and add the following to third party (or other repos) which you want to use, but do not want to update/upgrade packages that are part of the protected repos:

protect=0

see the attached readme file for an example.

5. To use the fastestmirror plugin, make sure you have the plugins=1 in /etc/yum.conf (see number 4. above) and then edit your /etc/yum.repos.d/ repos and add more than 1 mirror (as baseurl= ) for some of your repos ... see the attached readme file for some examples.

Currently, the verbose setting is high for fastestmirror ... you may adjust that in /etc/yum/pluginconf.d/fastestmirror.conf. We will probably make this verbose=0 on final release.

6. There are other plugins that are not enabled by default .... you can see all the plugins in /usr/share/doc/yum-utils-0.3.1/plugins

To enable a plugin that is not currently enabled, copy the .py file from it's directory to /usr/lib/yum-plugins/ and it's .conf file to /etc/yum/pluginconf.d/

(and make sure that /etc/yum.conf has a plugins=1 line in it)

yum-utils is also installed. See the README in /usr/share/doc/yum- utils/ for all the commands you can do with yum-utils.

---------- Thanks, Johnny Hughes