update problem - up2date or yum error - strange error message updating

[Alexander Dalloz]

Ok folks!

As up to today each day someone asks about problems he faces running an
update on Fedora Core 1, using up2date or yum, I decided to write down
in short a FAQ article to this issue.

Fedora Core 1 comes with up2date and yum to let people easily install
new packages, packages out of the core as well as from third party
sources. Both tools are configured by default this way that they connect
to the redhat.com server. Due to the high volume it meanwhile has to
deal with there is a problem. Users are facing error messages running
the update tools, complaints about corrupted GPG keys, wrong file sizes,
cryptic python messages, and so on. At least the download is very, very
slow.

In order to better the situation at all - as now even some of the mirror
servers have problems to get in sync with the Fedora repositories on the
Redhat server - please change the default configuration files and choose
a mirror server for getting packages online. Until there is an easy to
use setup tool - either command line based or GUI - we have to do it
manually. Follow me ...

1) the up2date way

The tool up2date get it's configuration by /etc/sysconfig/rhn/sources.
It is a plain text file and to be edited with the editor by choice (vim,
emacs, nano, joe, ...)
Already there are the lines:

yum fedora-core-1 \
http://fedora.redhat.com/releases/fedora-core-1
yum updates-released \
http://fedora.redhat.com/updates/released/fedora-core-1
#yum updates-testing \
http://fedora.redhat.com/updates/testing/fedora-core-1

! I did a "\" in there to be sure the lines are not broken in your
window. They are _one_ line, no linebreak, no "\" in it. In the
following I will use more "\" to signalize "I wrapped the line but you
have not to do so".

Put a # in front of each line. This marks them as comments.

Now visit http://fedora.redhat.com/download/mirrors.html and look there
for a convenient server. A good advice is to select your country (in USA
your coast) and then take one server address Normally, when joining that
server address for the Fedora files you will come to a directory where
there are 4 directories in: 1, development, test, updates Let us for
this example configuration take USA east coast server
http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distributions/fedora/linux/core/. We
take this URL and set up our first sources entry, the one for the Fedora
core files. Enter this to /etc/sysconfig/rhn/sources:

## Mirror USA east coast distro.ibiblio.org
yum ibiblio-fedora-core-1 \
http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distributions/fedora/linux/core/

Be aware! We are not ready with that last line. It misses the import
directory to the core files, which is 1/i386/. So the whole line must
look like:

yum ibiblio-fedora-core-1 \
http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distributions/fedora/linux/core/1/i386/os/

Using this scheme it is easy to add the next two repository entries, the
one for the updates and the one for testing packages. We first add the
line for updates which are in updates/1/i386/:

yum ibiblio-updates-released \
http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distributions/fedora/linux/core/updates/1/i386/

Attention! It is one whole line, no breaks, even you see them now in
your mail reader.

And finally we add the entry for testing packages, but we comment it, as
we do not want it active and not getting packages out of this.

# yum ibiblio-updates-testing \
http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distributions/fedora/linux/core/updates/testing/1/i386/

Well, ready so far. Save the edited file and run up2date - either on
command line or as GUI. It will now show you fetching the package list
from the two active repositories. Done!

2) the yum way

yum is configured by /etc/yum.conf which by default also uses the Redhat
server as source. So let us first comment the 6 lines in this
configuration file, beginning with [base] up to the end. Now we enter
the source for the core packages, again using the ibiblio.org server
(just as an example, please follow the advice given above).

[base]
name=Fedora Core $releasever - $basearch - Base
baseurl=http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distributions/fedora/linux/core/\
$releasever/$basearch/os/

(Attention: \ for linebreak just by me for visibility!)

If you want a second source just add a second line beginning with
"baseurl=" followed by the repositories address.

The entry for the Fedora released updates then looks this:

[updates-released]
name=Fedora Core $releasever - $basearch - Released Updates
baseutrl=http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distributions/fedora/linux/core/updates/\
$releasever/$basearch/

That's all. Save the changes to the file and run yum as before and now
see it fetching from the mirror. If you want more sources like by third
party, i.e. Fedora Extras, Livna.org or FreshRPMs, there is a huge,
ready to use yum.conf available at
http://fedora.artoo.net/faq/samples/yum.conf. It is too big to be pasted
here in whole.

At last one further general annotation. When you see that there are new
packages for Fedora out, please be a little patient and do not try to
get the updates by running your tool every minute or every hour. Nor
change your sources back to the Redhat server. I think the update
bottleneck will better when the mirror servers can connect the Redhat
server at full speed and redistribute their fetched packages around into
the world.

HTH

Alexander

P.S. Annotations and especially corrections are welcome.


-- 
Alexander Dalloz | Enger, Germany
PGP key valid: made 13.07.1999
PGP fingerprint: 2307 88FD 2D41 038E 7416  14CD E197 6E88 ED69 5653