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@xxxxxxxxxxxx -- Contract Programming: C/C++, Tcl/Tk
