[CentOS-devel] yum and fastestmirror

Wed Jun 18 18:11:22 UTC 2008
Wojciech Pilorz <wpilorz at gmail.com>

On Wed, Jun 18, 2008 at 2:37 PM, Johnny Hughes <johnny at centos.org> wrote:
> Wojciech Pilorz wrote:
>>
>> On Tue, Jun 17, 2008 at 4:12 PM, Karanbir Singh <mail-lists at karan.org>
>> wrote:
>>>
>>> Wojciech Pilorz wrote:
>>>>
>>>> yum-fastestmirror does not work behind some restrictive (oppresive?)
>>>> firewall
>>>> configuration.
>>>
>>> if yum itself is able to make http/ftp connects to a remote host, I dont
>>> see
>>> why yum-fastestmirror might have an issue, can you provide some specifics
>>> about what broke and how ?
>>>
>>
>> I have an environment where access to Internet is filtered, and only
>> allowed
>> through a squid proxy (and DNS queries only to a local DNS server).
>> yum needs proxy line in config file to work at all.
>>
>> If I run yum-fastestmirror in such environment,
>> /var/cache/yum/timedhosts.txt
>> contains 99999999999 in each entry (as direct connect to remote site
>> always fails).
>> So yum still does work, just the timing information is useless.
>>
>
> right ... and we are going to look at that.  But, in that case, all the
> mirrors have the same time.  This means that the "yum selection method" that
> is called out in the config file (random or in order) will be used as if you
> did not have fastestmirror installed.
>
As a workaround for fastestmirror problems, I used to copy timedhosts.txt file
from another machine with similar connectivity and authorised to have
direct connections to mirror sites.
Then I had to touch it periodically to avoid recreating with useless contents
by fastestmirror on affected machine.

Wojtek