[CentOS] Why not use yum mirrorlist= instead of baseurl= in CentOS-Base.repo

[Les Mikesell]

On Thu, 2005-10-13 at 15:30, Adam Gibson wrote:
> Currently the default yum configuration references mirror.centos.org. 
> When yum looks up the IP address it finds several but it will only try 
> one and fail if that server is down or does not have the headers for 
> whatever reason.

If yum were to retry using the alternate IP addresses, this wouldn't
be an issue.  Windows Internet Explorer manages this trick nicely, so it
can't be that difficult...

> If yum were to reference a mirrorlist it would skip servers that fail 
> and keep trying them all until it finds one that works or exhausts all 
> the mirrors.  Centos would host a file on their web server for each 
> repository that has a list of mirror baseurls.

If you have more than one machine behind a proxy, they will randomly
pick servers from the mirrorlist and use different URL's, so you
not only don't save the bandwidth by re-using the cached copy, you
duplicate the copies in the cache.  (Fedora already does it that
way).

> I created a test script to generate mirrorlists from the 
> mirror.centos.org DNS lookup and changed yum to reference the local 
> files that were generated as a mirrorlist= and it worked.

Now run a bunch of machine updates through the same squid proxy
and see what happens.  How about fixing yum to understand what
multiple A records in DNS is all about? 

-- 
  Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com