[K12OSN] yum problems on dialup

[Gavin Chester]

I recently took a BIG jump in newness of both my server and my K12LTSP
version and am having trouble with yum continually timing out.  For the
time being I'm still on dialup.

(Aside: I was using a cast-off PII 450MHz dual Xeon before, but I just
invested in a 2nd-hand PIV 2.66MHz dual Xeon with U320 SCSI RAID.
Yeeha!  Funny, while some things fly on the new server, some things are
only slightly faster.  Depends on how CPU intensive that task is,
obviously, since both servers had/have 2Gb of RAM).

I have a stock-standard 4.4.1 K12LTSP install, and using the supplied
yum conf files and repos.  I've had to disable the K12 repo entirely
because it never works for me, and when trying to run yum to upgrade or
install new apps more often than not the other repos also time out and
the operation fails with messages such as:

------------------------------
Trying other mirror.
primary.xml.gz            100% |=========================| 312 kB
01:14
http://mirror.hiwaay.net/redhat/fedora/linux/extras/4/i386/repodata/primary.xml.gz: [Errno 4] Socket Error: timed out
Trying other mirror
------------------------------

	.. and so, and so on for all repos until no more mirrors left.

	Sometimes I get a 404 error, such as:

--------------------------
http://ftp.lug.ro/fedora/linux/extras/4/i386/repodata/primary.xml.gz:
[Errno 4] IOError: HTTP Error 404:
 Date: Tue, 30 May 2006 03:04:45 GMT
--------------------------
	
	... and sometimes I get this yum (not network) error:

-----------------------------------
//var/cache/yum/base/repomd.xml:84: parser error : Opening and ending
tag mismatch: html line 3 and body
</body>
       ^
//var/cache/yum/base/repomd.xml:85: parser error : Extra content at the
end of the document
</html>
^
Cannot open/read repomd.xml file for repository: base
Error importing repomd.xml from base: Error: could not parse
file //var/cache/yum/base/repomd.xml
--------------------------------- 
     

Can anyone shed any light on this?  Or, is dialup always going to be a
problem with my new install?  I had occasional trouble with my old yum
setup, but never as consistently bad as this.  So far I've only managed
a couple of new apps installed with yum.  

Regards, Gavin.