www.centos.org - News - CentOS 4 - New CentOS-4 update system

CentOS 4 : New CentOS-4 update system

Posted by hughesjr on 2006/2/15 3:30:00 (159413 reads)

The CentOS Project has developed a GeoIP® enabled system for our CentOS-4 yum updates that generates dynamic mirror lists based on two very important items:

1. The connecting location of the client.

2. The current freshness/staleness of the mirrors for that region.

This update system will allow us to read the connecting location of a client, look for fresh mirrors close to that client, and provide a list of ten mirrors for each CentOS repository that is included in the file /etc/yum.repos.d/CentOS-Base.repo. The selection base is currently about 100 mirrors from around the world.

This update system will be introduced with the package centos-yumconf-4-4.4.noarch.rpm. All newer versions of centos-yumconf will contain this capability as well.

The use of the Fastest Mirror yum plugin (yum-plugin-fastestmirror) with the update system is highly encouraged for normal users. This plugin will look at the dynamically provided mirror list and pick the fastest mirror based on connection time from your client machine. It will also rank the mirrors in connection speed order for fail-over connections.

The combination of a geographically based, fresh, and ranked by speed mirrorlist system should provide CentOS users with a reliable and high speed mirror system with fail-over tolerance.

How do I get this new system?

This system is now live. If you update your system with the normal yum update command you will get the new centos-yumconf package.

Note: If you see that the file /etc/yum.repos.d/CentOS-Base.repo.rpmnew is created, you are not using the new update system because your CentOS-Base.repo has been previously edited and was not replaced. If you want to try the new system, you must manually move the new CentOS-Base.repo.rpmnew to be CentOS-Base.repo.

If you want to also install the yum-plugin-fastestmirror package use this command:

yum install yum-plugin-fastestmirror

After installing the the plugin, you must edit the file /etc/yum.conf and add the following to that file:

plugins=1

AOL users: If you are an AOL user outside the United States, Geo-IP does not properly pick your country. You are instead assigned a country code of US. If you are an AOL user outside the US, you can add you country code to your /etc/yum.repos.d/CentOS-Base.repo file. As an example for the mirrorlist line for the [base] repo if you are an AOL customer in the United Kingdom, here is the original line:

mirrorlist=http://mirrorlist.centos.org/?release=$releasever&arch=$basearch&repo=os

You would change it to:

mirrorlist=http://mirrorlist.centos.org/?release=$releasever&arch=$basearch&repo=os&cc=gb

For a list of valid country codes, see this link:
http://www.maxmind.com/app/iso3166

GeoIP is a registered trademark of MaxMind LLC

The comments are owned by the poster. We aren't responsible for their content.

Poster	Thread
ianneub	Posted: 2006/2/16 23:15 Updated: 2006/2/16 23:16
Newbie Joined: 2004/12/22 From: Posts: 7	Re: New CentOS-4 update system Changing to port 81 may cause a whole lot of problems. Many people may have firewalls, proxy servers, corporate policy, etc that get in a the way of this change. See http://www.centos.org/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=3102&forum=28

Poster	Thread
jywang	Posted: 2006/2/17 2:28 Updated: 2006/2/17 2:28
Newbie Joined: 2006/2/17 From: Posts: 6	Re: New CentOS-4 update system Dear Sir or Madam, Why not use port 80 to let ALL squid and iptables work happier? BRs.

Poster	Thread
hughesjr	Posted: 2006/2/17 12:35 Updated: 2006/2/17 12:35
WebMaster Joined: 2004/12/5 From: Corpus Christi, Texas, USA Posts: 415 Online!	Re: New CentOS-4 update system Due to popular demand, the new update system mirrorlist handout has been shifted to port 80 ... Thanks for all the feedback P.S. - Blocking outbound ports is evil

Poster	Thread
ianneub	Posted: 2006/2/17 18:30 Updated: 2006/2/17 18:30
Newbie Joined: 2004/12/22 From: Posts: 7	Re: New CentOS-4 update system Yay! Thanks hughesjr!

Poster	Thread
micha	Posted: 2006/2/26 19:07 Updated: 2006/2/26 19:07
Newbie Joined: 2005/4/25 From: France Posts: 6	Re: New CentOS-4 update system Works great. Thanks a lot !!!!

Poster	Thread
tashirosgt	Posted: 2006/3/10 1:49 Updated: 2006/3/10 1:49
Newbie Joined: 2006/3/9 From: Posts: 1	The Service Pack approach Just a thought: Many computers are not connected to the internet or only have a slow connection. There would be some merit in providing (say) yearly updates in the format of a program that could run from cds. Perhaps the places that sell cds of Linux distributions would also begin selling such cds if they were called "service packs".

Poster	Thread
hughesjr	Posted: 2006/3/11 11:34 Updated: 2006/3/11 11:43
WebMaster Joined: 2004/12/5 From: Corpus Christi, Texas, USA Posts: 415 Online!	Re: The Service Pack approach we are already doing that ... The updated ISOs (CD and DVD) contain all the information to use use them as a yum repository for updates. (There are full repodata {used by yum} and headers {used by up2date} directories on the CD / DVDS that are released 2-4 times per year.) If you use the DVD, you can use it as is to do updates: yum localupdate /path_to _mounted_DVD If you use CDs, you will need to copy them all into the same directory so there is one RPMS directory that contains all the RPMS ... and you can do the same thing by pointing to that directory. yum localupdate /path_to _combined_tree If you publish that directory (or mounted DVD) via a web server ... it is a fully functional yum or up2date server that you can point to. It would look exactly like this location: http://mirror.centos.org/centos/4/os/i386/ (that is the i386 DVD extracted ) Using this approach, you only get updates when a new ISO is released. We already do this 2-4 times a year and you can either download the ISOs or buy them from an Official CentOS ISO Vendor. The Service Pack thing is already taken ... we call it an update set (as the upstream provider releases these updates in a set 2-4 times per year).

Poster	Thread
karmapolis	Posted: 2006/5/5 23:28 Updated: 2006/5/5 23:28
Newbie Joined: 2006/5/5 From: Posts: 5	Re: New CentOS-4 update system I suggest that you add an option to the new mirrorlist.centos.org script so that corporate users are able to query specifically for rsync mirrors to build their intranet mirrors. This way, one could write a script to automatically choose from one server on that list, instead of having to rely on the only fixed one (the master rsync server) which is probably already burdened. For example, instead of... http://mirrorlist.centos.org/?release=$releasever&arch=$basearch&repo=os ... one might try this one... http://mirrorlist.centos.org/?release=$releasever&arch=$basearch&repo=os&proto=rsync ... to get only rsync mirrors that are "nearby" (in GeoIP terms).

Poster	Thread
Valerion	Posted: 2006/8/20 7:05 Updated: 2006/8/20 7:05
Newbie Joined: 2005/9/7 From: Posts: 1	Re: New CentOS-4 update system Yes, adding a protocol will be nice. I am running into the yum proxy issue (my upstream ISP's transparent proxy is to blame), and have to use FTP. Currently I have a static set of FTP mirrors, but a GeoIP-based system would make it a lot easier.

Poster	Thread
hughesjr	Posted: 2006/10/30 22:10 Updated: 2006/10/30 22:10
WebMaster Joined: 2004/12/5 From: Corpus Christi, Texas, USA Posts: 415 Online!	Re: New CentOS-4 update system we don't give out rsyncs, as this is only for the update system (yum and/or up2date) and so is only ftp or http. We might be able to add a proto for either http or ftp though in the current script.