[PlanetCCRMA] YUM chews up my karma, and spits out evil

Jason Russler jason.russler@gmail.com
Mon Sep 3 15:13:03 2007


Oh good, I haven't a clue why this works but it's nice that it does.
You can't install the package if it's not in the meta-data file so
clearly we have what should be correct package/checksum pairs.  I don'
know enough about the internals of yum to really say what's happening
- but I'm pretty sure it's related to caching/transparent proxying on
some networks.  It's not hardware related since it's not transient and
always affects the same files.  It's certainly not CCRMA's repos.  I
can't wait to see what your diff looks like.

I would not have been surprised if using a proxy server that listens
on port 80 would have resulted in the same behavior. However proxies
often run on higher ports and since I don't think the ISPs do any
application-layer sniffing to see what kind of traffic is going
around, that will circumvent the HTTP-related "performance enhancers".
 Also, an SSL'd proxy would get around everything if they did.

As far as I can tell this behavior looks Comcast-specific.

~Jason

On 9/3/07, Ken Dawson <dawsonwu@rahul.net> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I assigned "proxy=http://68.180.195.13:80" in yum.conf, and tried the yum upgrade.  It was clearly slower, but did
> manage to succeed. So, as a workaround, this approach may be viable.
>
> I connect to comcast though a motorola surfboard cable modem connected to a netgear wpn824 router.  Both fedora boxes
> run the firewall.
>
> I'm going to try the a/b test I did earlier: copy down the planet's f7-related repos using wget using direct and proxied
> methods, and then do a tree diff.  They should be the same.
>
> /ken