[OLPC New Zealand] [Testing] Testing Summary: 19 November 2011 - Auckland, New Zealand

[Tom Parker]

On Mon, 2011-11-28 at 07:59 +1100, James Cameron wrote:
> Yes, yum is almost always broken, about 95% of attempts here.  It is no
> transient network issue for me.  I've diagnosed this further and for me
> the most likely cause is that my two ISPs have automatic unofficial
> mirrors or caching proxies of Fedora and have a DNS that causes
> connections from my hosts to go to their host instead of Fedora.  DNS
> queries sent elsewhere give different answers.

So the first time I read this, I thought you were saying that your isp
had a transparent proxy and was intercepting your requests. On second
reading, I think you mean that yum is backed by a global list of mirrors
and it chooses one that is closest to you and unfortunately that mirror
is broken or incomplete for ARM. So, is it possible to tell yum to try
more mirrors? Or tell you which mirror(s) it tried? Or force yum to use
a specific known to be good mirror?

I did a little investigation a while ago using strace and various debug
options but didn't even manage to make sense of what it was doing. I
should have sniffed the network traffic.

I normally use ubuntu where the mirror selection is done in the
sources.list and that is a bit easier to follow. When the NZ mirror
misbehaves I just switch to the USA one by modifying the file (and
later, eventually, notice things are slower than they should be and move
it back).