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

[James Cameron]

On Sun, Dec 04, 2011 at 09:07:56PM +1300, Tom Parker wrote:
> 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.

The ISP is intercepting DNS requests and returning an IP that is a proxy
of some sort, that responds as if it is legitimate.  The same IP is not
returned with repeated queries from my connection to the other ISP, or
via SSH from a host in the USA.  Whether it is a member of the global
mirror population ... I did not determine, because I don't have a way to
do that.  But it is a possible explanation.  In one case, the IP
translated to an akamai domain.

> 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 don't know, sorry.  I know how to do it with Ubuntu or Debian.  You
might ask on devel@ or a Fedora mailing list.

-- 
James Cameron
http://quozl.linux.org.au/