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

[John Watlington]

On Dec 4, 2011, at 6:01 PM, James Cameron wrote:

> 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.

At least your ISP isn't nasty enough to hijack DNS requests to alternate
servers, like the satellite ones.     How about using the IP addresses of
a real mirror in yum.repos.d instead of DNS names ?

wad