Yum socket time out FC4

[Thomas]

Yum, Yumex, Up2date give up too easily! 
Socket time out, and they START OVER with another server!

After considerable trial and error, I believe these changes fix this
problem.
Yum, et.al as shipped with fedora core v4 would not run over dial up,
reliably.
It would report socket time out during download, and START OVER with
another server.

Making these changes in the file /etc/yum.conf seems to have fixed the
problem.
retries=0
throttle=4k
bandwidth=5.6k
Remember, this is over dialup.

Also, as shipped, FC4 includes the line:
mirrorlist=http://download.redhat.com  - - - yada. yada. yada 
in the files listed under /etc/yum.repos.d.

I believe it is NOT necessary to download the list of mirrors and then
try each one. Why attempt to download a large binary file from some
server half way around the planet? Especially if you have a mirror
across the street!

So place a hash mark "#" at the beginning of any line beginning with
mirrorlist= disable yum from downloading the mirror list. 
You can find this mirror list at
http://fedora.redhat.com/download/mirrors.html 
save a local copy, or print a local copy, and enter useful server urls
as shown in 
a useful document from
http://www.siliconvalleyccie.com/linux-hn/rpm.htm.
However, in that document, and in the man pages for yum.conf examples
show the following:
baseurl=http://yada.yada.yada
        url=ftp://moreof-the_same
        url=http://continues/with/more/stuff/here

When I attempted this yum would exit with the error message
not trying files, ftp, http, and quit.
I believe the yum interpreter can not handle white space at the
beginning of a line, so change your list of urls to:
baseurl=http://so_on_and_so_forth
url=http://more/of/the/same

with no whitespace at the beginning of the line.
 With a list of known good servers
in /etc/yum.conf set failovermethod=priority
and yum will use each server in the list, in order, as needed. 
There is no need to download the mirror list, and attempt to connect to
every server on that list.

Finally a question for the YUM Wizards, why not have YUM attempt to
restart a timed out session, or a canceled session, from the point in
the file where download was interrupted? Is it not possible to restart a
failed download from the last known good packet received?

regards
Thomas