[CentOS] fasttest mirror -doesnt seem to pick sites near my region

Sat Aug 22 21:17:04 UTC 2009
Karanbir Singh <mail-lists at karan.org>

Hi!

On 08/22/2009 01:56 PM, Linux Advocate wrote:
> guys, i have the yum plugin ->  fastest mirror . But not even once i have seen it selecting repos which are near my region such as japan or australia ( where i get the best speeds). Something is wrong.

There are a few different things that are at play here. Firstly, the 
mirrorlist will do a geoip lookup and give you what should be the 'best 
list' for you, so its possible the ip you are connecting from isnt being 
recognised as being in Japan. from the list you posted, it clearly looks 
like its passing you European mirrors. So that would be the first place 
to test.

Could you open an issue report at bugs.centos.org against the 'Mirror' 
project, with what ip / subnet you are connecting from ?

> It seems stuck with these 3 sites ;
>
> Determining fastest mirrors
>   * ftp-stud.fht-esslingen.de : 0.309373 secs
>   * apt.sw.be : 0.483867 secs
>   * fr2.rpmfind.net : 0.503842 secs

So, there are a few options you have here - you can either just replace 
the mirrorlist with the baseurl= line in /etc/yum.repos.d/ - however, I 
would strongly encourage you to NOT do that. You are much better off 
resolving the issue at hand. If you look at 
/etc/yum/pluginconf.d/fastestmirror.conf you will see the default 
settings, which should be something like this :

[main]
enabled=1
verbose=0
socket_timeout=3
hostfilepath=/var/cache/yum/timedhosts.txt
maxhostfileage=10
maxthreads=15

in order to refresh the cash, 'yum clean all' should remove 
/var/cache/yum/timedhosts.txt ; however if thats failing, another issue 
report on bugs.centos.org! also try to remove it manually - its possible 
some acl layer is getting in the way.

Finally, the mashostfileage ( in days )[1] - you can consider reducing 
that to '1'. During the first few days ( < 5 ) from the time a new 
release goes out ( like 4.8 ), mirror performance can vary by large 
factors on a daily basis. It might be a good idea to reduce that on your 
machine anyway, and see if that builds your confidence in the way this 
works.

Hope this helps.

[2] its not hard reducing the resolution of mashostfileage, I plan on 
investigating what the implications around it might be.

-- 
Karanbir Singh : http://www.karan.org/  : 2522219 at icq