Yum Update Mirrors

[Phil Meyer]

Christian Campbell wrote:
> Running FC5 and trying to do a 'yum check-update'.  Was receiving 
> timeouts, and increased the timeout to 300 seconds.  Now, when trying 
> to download primary.xml.gz files...the ETA to completion is over 500 
> minutes.  I'm assuming the mirror sites are saturated?  I'm running on 
> a T-1 connection, so I'm guessing the bandwidth problem isn't on my end. 
>  
> Does anyone have any suggestions on how I can effectively use yum?  A 
> different list of mirror sites?  Any help appreciated.
>
As others have mentioned, it quite often is the server that is limiting 
you.  Here is a exercise that may help:

1.    Download a list of mirrors for a repository:

    The easiest way is to grab the URL right from the yum repo file.  
For instance:
    The updates repo file says this:
$ head /etc/yum.repos.d/fedora-updates.repo
...
mirrorlist=http://fedora.redhat.com/download/mirrors/updates-released-fc$releasever
...

Ok, from that we can derive a URL for the mirror list.
wget -O /tmp/moo 
http://fedora.redhat.com/download/mirrors/updates-released-fc5

That gives us a file /tmp/moo containing a partial list of mirrors.
Examining this list you may recognize sites that have great bandwidth 
from where you live.
If you do then list them in another file, or simply delete all the 
entries in this file that you know will suck from where you are.  You 
might even browse to those URLs and test a download or two to make sure.

OK, we now have a list of a couple or three sites that generally work 
good from where we are.

2.   Modify the repo file to check your favorite sites first.

In our example we have been using the updates list of mirrors.  Edit the 
/etc/yum.repos.d/fedora-updates.repo file and add your entries BEFORE 
the mirrorlist line:
Precede each entry with:
baseurl=

Now when you run yum updates, your favorite mirrors will be checked 
first, instead of a random site on the other side of the world that may 
give 2k per second transfer rates from where you are. :)