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

[seth vidal]

On Wed, 2006-10-25 at 09:36 -0400, Robert Heller wrote:
> 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).

Later versions of yum have improved on:
 - resuming cancelled downloads
 - ctrl-c'ing while downloading pkgs
 - throttling the connections

Unfortunately these are not things that are really ever going to be
backported to yum 2.4.X. 

The best I can tell you is that these problems should probably be solved
in centos 5.

-sv