On 11/24/05, Bryan J. Smith thebs413@earthlink.net wrote:
On Thu, 2005-11-24 at 12:00 -0600, Johnny Hughes wrote:
It's called a local mirror
I have to agree with Johnny. If you're maintaining any number of systems, take it upon yourself to maintain a local mirror and rsync. Tag updates in your YUM (or other) repository appropriately until you have tested them. Then retag them appropriately when you have found a release with packages that are all inter-working well.
Comments for this and the preceding post:
1. Paying for Red Hat does not resolve the problem as I described it. The Red Hat service provides for big bucks very slow, low bandwith access to it's updates. It's like watching paint dry when I have to download updates at work. I'll stick with free but erratic delivery if those are the choices. YOU DO NOT GET WHAT YOU PAY FOR.
2. The local mirror and sync process is certainly an approach if you have the patience (or the right parameters? I have no experience) to keep retrying until you eventually get past the stuck point. Also, I don't have a lot of machines to maintain, and this is only an occasional pain. It's only a real pain when I let a machine (like my laptop) get very back level on maintenance.
3. I started my rant with praise, and I continue the praise. CentOS is one of (if not the) best enterprise Linux offerings. That being said, the software delivery (including Dag which is not a part of CentOS but which is relied on by a lot of folks) is not up to the reliability level that I have experienced elsewhere. For example, I ran Gentoo for years, and I seldom found this type of problem getting updates even though the volume of downloads (source) is much higher than for CentOS and Dag (binary). For example, I've been maintaining a Ubuntu system for several months alongside of CentOS. I very rarely encounter this type of problem with Ubuntu updates.
Please don't waste your breath saying I should go elsewhere. I will continue to use CentOS and to recommend it to my friends. It's a great product.
IMO, this is purely a mechanical problem. Whatever the methods, other FOSS providers manage to avoid this type of erratic delivery. I don't have a clue how. I have no experience setting up or maintaining a system of mirrors.
I'm on the fifth attempt this morning to get through about 200 packages, and I don't think the results would have been much different if I were trying to sync a local mirror. This isn't even the post-new-update-rush, for $DEITY sake.The first 3 attempts hung totally at retrieving a man update. The next attempt waded through about 80 more packages and then hung. The final attempt is trying many mirrors again and not getting there again.
I've changed my mirror settings a few times, but there does not appear to be an ideal solution. Thus my frustration.
-- Collins Richey Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code ... If you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it. -Brian Kernighan