[K12OSN] yum problems on dialup

Gavin Chester sales at ecosolutions.com.au
Thu Jun 1 01:58:19 UTC 2006


On Tue, 2006-05-30 at 11:29 -0700, Eric Harrison wrote:
> Gavin Chester wrote:

-snip-

> > 
> > Now, I just have to tackle that issue of the XML file not parsing
> > correctly when I use the repo 'extras'.  Perhaps the first thing I
> > should do is restore the original repo file by removing my pasted-in
> > Australian mirror for that repo.  See how I go :-) 
> 
> I'm guessing that the XML parsing issue will be resolved by increasing
> the timeout.
> The parsing error is probably due to the fact that you downloaded PART
> of the file before it timed out.

You were definitely on the right track there, Eric.  As mentioned
before, following your guide to increase yum timeout worked except for
the repos that had been giving XML parsing errors.  After checking the
detail of those files, I eventually took the plunge and deleted the
errant XML file, hoping it would be recreated at the next run of
'update'.  My hunch proved correct and all parsing errors vanished.
When it did reappear once more after another 'timeout' (despite 180 sec
timeout) it didn't build to be such a problem that it wasn't
self-correcting.  Whew.

As an aside, I can only repeat my complaint of more than a year ago that
yum is VERY wasteful of time and bandwidth when on dialup. With the full
suite of repos enabled (about 10, I remember) it can take more than
10mins to just load the header files, etc before yum even starts to look
at downloading the selected package.  The big problem is that it doesn't
cache this info locally and when you select a new download straight
after it goes through retrieving all the repo headers, etc all over
again.  This can amount to about 4Mb downloaded before even considering
the selected package.  VERY inefficient :-(

Gavin    




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