[RndTbl] Re: fedora updates with "fallback" sites...

[Gilbert E. Detillieux]

According to Sean A. Walberg:
> On Sat, 7 Feb 2004, Gilbert E. Detillieux wrote:
> > Of course, if our mirror gets bogged down from overuse, you may want to
> > point to a different mirror.  Fortunately, there are a few others right in
> > Canada now...
> 
> I just tried it out last night, and it worked great.  Reading a bit in the 
> manual, though, you can put a list of mirror sites in, and they will be 
> tried sequentially:
> 
> ie
> 
> baseurl=http://site1/path
> 	http://site2/path
> 
> http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/General/yum_HOWTO/yum_HOWTO/yum_HOWTO-10.html#ss10.1
> 
> So, it might be best to leave the original mirror site in as a backup, or 
> pick another server.

Yes, I came across that HOWTO soon after writing my article.  I thought of
updating things to mention this, but...

1) It doesn't work with up2date, where you can only specify a single URL
   per repository.

2) It doesn't work with yum 1.x, which is what we use on earlier Red Hat
   systems.  There, the above would just give you a syntax error.

3) It doesn't even seem to work as advertised with yum 2.0.4 under Fedora.
   I tried it out, using MUUG as the primary site, and the official Fedora
   download site as the fallback.  When this seemed to slow down the "yum
   update", I got suspicious and checked the MUUG web logs.  Sure enough,
   yum was only contacting the fallback site, and not the MUUG server.
 
> Another curiousity... The CDs I had on hand were for Fedora Core Test 3,
> so I installed it anyway.  Edited yum.conf to point to the MUUG site, but
> the core 1 base and updates.  "yum update", and I had myself a Core 1 box
> at the end of it!

Yes, that's not too surprising, since the changes between the test releases
and the subsequent official release should be minor and incremental.

> Not sure if I'm brave enough to try the same starting at RH 9. :)

As you pointed out in your later message, "yum upgrade" (rather than update)
does a better job when upgrading across versions or releases.  However, the
man page points out that this option is deprecated and may disappear in
future versions of yum.

Fortunately, the changes between RH 9 and Fedora Core 1 were not so drastic
that "yum upgrade" does a reasonable job.  I wasn't brave enought to try
that, though, and instead opted for upgrading from the Fedora installer.

-- 
Gilbert E. Detillieux		E-mail:	<gedetil at cs.umanitoba.ca>
Dept. of Computer Science	Web:	http://www.cs.umanitoba.ca/~gedetil/
University of Manitoba		Phone:	(204)474-8161
Winnipeg, MB, CANADA  R3T 2N2	Fax:	(204)474-7609