John Summerfied wrote:
It may be "very easy" but only when you know how. I've installed a few Debian systems, and it's impossible to avoid the opportunity to choose a local mirror.It's not a yum related problem. If the server is incomplete , it means that apt , yum and any other other app that does something like yum/apt do , they'll have issues with broken mirrors.
First, it asks "What country..." and that promptly weeds out .fi, .il, .ru and .mx.
In contrast, nothing in FC asked me what to use, and I've not seen any documentation on the topic. Nor, it happens, do I know a near-by mirror.
It seems some of the mirrors used by Yum are beorkn - I often get 404 errors.
I'm not a fan on Yum.
There's no easy way to fix this. If you find one , please post it , since keeping several mirrors in synch is certainly something very difficult, specially when you dont have control over them.
For a good description of the updates , subscribe to fedora-announce-list. Usually the security updates are listed with the [SECURITY] tag in the subject , but sometimes a security update goes by without any special mention besides the entry in the changelog saying something like "Fixed CAN #.... ".I think most are usability improvements for the desktop, and probably not really needed on servers.
I note that there have been several kernel updates, and that he latest is broken (on my laptop it doesn't shut down, gets an oops instead). Not good for transporting.
I'd not like such a volatile selection of software on my server, I'd be perpetually worried that something will break, and if a server breaks then the whole enterprise (school in my case) is affected.
Yes, for example there was a recent util-linux update that "broke" (though there was a workaround that could be used) client-side NFS mounts to older servers, though an updated update was released the day after.
This justifies my hands-on update policy.
The option to log software updates would be good - email (preferably to another box) and a printed report are good options.
Then the approach you need is something different: configure your machines to download from a local mirror. And only put in that mirror the packages that you have already tested on your network.
-- Pedro Macedo
