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
