[Yum] YUM and slow dial up connections...

Robert Heller heller at deepsoft.com
Wed Oct 25 13:36:00 UTC 2006


It seems that yum has not been well tested over slow dialup connections.
I have been working on updating my Linux systems (CentOS 4.3/4.4) and
the only internet connection I have is a slow dial up connection (which
is all that is available here in rural Western Mass -- there are no
affordable broadband options available).

Because my bandwith is limited, any one thing will suck up ALL of it. 
I'd like to run yum as a kind of background activity and would like to
pause (or cancel) its *downloading* phase so I can do other internet
things (like check my E-Mail) or to just use my phone line for voice
calls.  yum does not respond to Ctrl-C -- it would be nice if it did. 
Doing the package updates a few at a time works, most of the time. 
Sometimes there are odd package interactions that break things (updating
sqlite without also updating python-sqlite causes yum to go off into
never never land -- I had to downgrade sqlite to get yum working again).

Also, my dialup connection is not super reliable -- yum does not seem to
handle a lost connection particularly gracefully -- it keeps trying
'other' mirrors and *eventually* crashes, but only after trying all of
the mirrors.  It seems that yum assumes that the internet connection is
always 100% reliable.

I'm using yum version 2.4.2 (yum-2.4.2-2.centos4). On a CentOS 4.3/4.4
system (it is a stock CentOS 4.3 system with *some* of the updates to
bring it up to CentOS 4.4 applied).


-- 
Robert Heller             -- 978-544-6933
Deepwoods Software        -- Linux Installation and Administration
http://www.deepsoft.com/  -- Web Hosting, with CGI and Database
heller at deepsoft.com       -- Contract Programming: C/C++, Tcl/Tk
                 



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