Yum, Yumex, Up2date give up too easily! Socket time out, and they START OVER with another server! After considerable trial and error, I believe these changes fix this problem. Yum, et.al as shipped with fedora core v4 would not run over dial up, reliably. It would report socket time out during download, and START OVER with another server. Making these changes in the file /etc/yum.conf seems to have fixed the problem. retries=0 throttle=4k bandwidth=5.6k Remember, this is over dialup. Also, as shipped, FC4 includes the line: mirrorlist=http://download.redhat.com - - - yada. yada. yada in the files listed under /etc/yum.repos.d. I believe it is NOT necessary to download the list of mirrors and then try each one. Why attempt to download a large binary file from some server half way around the planet? Especially if you have a mirror across the street! So place a hash mark "#" at the beginning of any line beginning with mirrorlist= disable yum from downloading the mirror list. You can find this mirror list at http://fedora.redhat.com/download/mirrors.html save a local copy, or print a local copy, and enter useful server urls as shown in a useful document from http://www.siliconvalleyccie.com/linux-hn/rpm.htm. However, in that document, and in the man pages for yum.conf examples show the following: baseurl=http://yada.yada.yada url=ftp://moreof-the_same url=http://continues/with/more/stuff/here When I attempted this yum would exit with the error message not trying files, ftp, http, and quit. I believe the yum interpreter can not handle white space at the beginning of a line, so change your list of urls to: baseurl=http://so_on_and_so_forth url=http://more/of/the/same with no whitespace at the beginning of the line. With a list of known good servers in /etc/yum.conf set failovermethod=priority and yum will use each server in the list, in order, as needed. There is no need to download the mirror list, and attempt to connect to every server on that list. Finally a question for the YUM Wizards, why not have YUM attempt to restart a timed out session, or a canceled session, from the point in the file where download was interrupted? Is it not possible to restart a failed download from the last known good packet received? regards Thomas
