Havin_it Posted March 13, 2005 Report Share Posted March 13, 2005 EXPERIMENT! I've come to one conclusion about the Mandrake URPMI repositories: they are not all created equal. If I stay too long with my sources set on one particular repo, the silence becomes deafening. So I change, and get a bunch of updates that the old repo didn't have yet. Soooo... it occurs that if I have a few of my favourite repo's set up at any one time in URPMI, I'd be better covered. I'd probably limit it to the main and main_updates sources, so I didn't spend too long downloading new hdlists every time I checked. Ideally I might work them into a script that could check the connection to each repo before commencing. But is this wise? I've no idea what having multiple versions of more-or-less the same repo would do to URPMI. If 2 repo's have the same update to offer, how is one chosen over the other? Alphabetically by source name, so source 'main' would be chosen before 'main2'? I'm fully prepared to try this out myself, but if it's already been done, or anyone knows reasons why it might be a bad idea, I'd like to hear about it. Oh yes, and here's my research assistant Dr. Banana Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest anon Posted March 13, 2005 Report Share Posted March 13, 2005 I update our own version of easy-urpmi more often than the original easy-urpmi site. However, servers go down or offline for a variety of reasons, so i have two main and two update sites listed in my config file file, It has never caused a problem yet but how which site is selected in which order i don't know, but maybe its on first or fastest connection? Of course not all servers sync their data at the same time, and urpmi will always select the latest file version. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gowator Posted March 13, 2005 Report Share Posted March 13, 2005 When I used to work with Dr. Banana we found the same thing.... It seems updates are ripples that go forwards and backwards but its always hard to work out and sometimes they chain off one another and it goes bad and other times... I was very happy with Dr. Banana but we split over this.... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Havin_it Posted March 13, 2005 Author Report Share Posted March 13, 2005 He still speaks of you sometimes... Did he used to drink so much? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
adamw Posted March 14, 2005 Report Share Posted March 14, 2005 Nope, as long as the media are for the correct version of MDK this won't hurt anything at all, it can't cause any problems that wouldn't happen if you just had a single media. urpmi won't pick the fastest of the two media by itself or anything, though, you'll have to tell it which to use with the --media option. If one of the two has more recent packages than the other (i.e. syncs faster), urpmi will pick up the newest packages available. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Havin_it Posted March 15, 2005 Author Report Share Posted March 15, 2005 Thanks! Just what I needed to hear. I'll start off with 2x main and 2x updates, and put the faster source alphabetically before the slower. Just got my DSL upgraded today so it should still be faster anyway ;) Dr Banana, Fire up the orgasmatron! BTW, any idea how I could work EasyURPMI into a script to keep tabs on working sources? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest anon Posted March 15, 2005 Report Share Posted March 15, 2005 I update the mirrors on our easy-urpmi site often, but obviously a mirror could go down five minutes after its checked / updated. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
iphitus Posted March 15, 2005 Report Share Posted March 15, 2005 Just make sure you update your hdlists before using a source, you'll get problems if it gets out of date. I never had above mentioned problems when i used mandrake, Try the australian mirrors ;) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Havin_it Posted March 15, 2005 Author Report Share Posted March 15, 2005 Ah, so it is a manual operation? I had it in my head that it was checking automatically whether servers were 'up'. Makes me appreciate you even more! Guess I'll have to invent something myself... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest anon Posted March 15, 2005 Report Share Posted March 15, 2005 Ah, so it is a manual operation? I had it in my head that it was checking automatically whether servers were 'up'. I check whether the servers are up but more importantly, if they have all the files their supposed to mirror, if any of them don't or are down, they get removed. Once thats done our urpmi site mirror list gets updated. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gowator Posted March 15, 2005 Report Share Posted March 15, 2005 Nope, as long as the media are for the correct version of MDK this won't hurt anything at all, it can't cause any problems that wouldn't happen if you just had a single media. urpmi won't pick the fastest of the two media by itself or anything, though, you'll have to tell it which to use with the --media option. If one of the two has more recent packages than the other (i.e. syncs faster), urpmi will pick up the newest packages available. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> True but Dr. Banana also used to use --noclean this way if the dep ended missing from one mirror I just switched the source to one that I guessed was updated (or perhaps the other way) and then rerun urpmi... this time it finds the ones which are already cached ... but looks in the new place for the one which isn't. loves Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
adamw Posted March 15, 2005 Report Share Posted March 15, 2005 gowator: current urpmi will keep in the cache any packages that don't install successfully, so you don't even need to invoke --noclean. :) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Havin_it Posted March 16, 2005 Author Report Share Posted March 16, 2005 I didn't really follow the last two posts... What I normally do for an update is just urpmi.update -a urpmi --auto-select And when the hdlist contains packages that aren't on the media (I think that's what it is), I do rpm -rebuilddb as directed - although it doesn't seem to help most times. That's usually the point at which I swap repos. What I'm gonna do is have say ftp.esat.net (fast but fulla mistakes) named 'main', and gd.tuwien.ac.at (quite comprehensive but damn slow) 'main2', assuming that's enough to give esat precedence. I'm still keen to automate this as much as possible though. Can anyone tell me: is there a command-line equivalent of RPMDrake's checkboxes for enabling/disabling media? This could be useful for maintaining a larger list of sources while only using some of them, switching between them etc. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gowator Posted March 16, 2005 Report Share Posted March 16, 2005 Havin_it: That's fine. I used to just do an urpmi.update -a every night on a cron job but what I found is sometimes its just a synchronisation prob on the mirrors. Sometimes they can be really bad, I don't know the reason but what I found is just wait or try a different source and try again. Like adamw says, if it doesn't install it keeps the packages it did find until it can sucessfully find them.... then it deletes them unless you use --noclean or change the /etc/urpmi.conf I try not to mess about with the rebuild-db unless something is desperate... mostly the probelms are just that a paticualr package hasn't been updated and waiting or finding a more up to date mirror can solve this. I am of the school that prefers small frequent updates to big upgrades so often i would de-select a couple of packages who's deps were causing probs and try again... then the particualt bit you missed out can be tried later... Can anyone tell me: is there a command-line equivalent of RPMDrake's checkboxes for enabling/disabling media? This could be useful for maintaining a larger list of sources while only using some of them, switching between them etc. I can confidently answer YES since this is linux and the GUI is just a front end ... now what the command actually is? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest anon Posted March 16, 2005 Report Share Posted March 16, 2005 What I'm gonna do is have say ftp.esat.net (fast but fulla mistakes) named 'main', and gd.tuwien.ac.at (quite comprehensive but damn slow) 'main2', assuming that's enough to give esat precedence. There is no way to consistently guarantee that system will work, and so trying to automate it is going to be difficult to achieve results. Although servers go down from time to time, the main problem of not being able to connect is often "over connection limit" Some mirrors on easy-urpmi allow 500 or more connections, others only around 50. Some don't have a connection limit but have a bandwidth limit, when its reached.....you can't connect. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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