[Gllug] CentOS and RHES

Karanbir Singh mail-lists at karan.org
Mon Oct 24 19:42:09 UTC 2005


Hi Jason,

Jason Clifford wrote:

 > There is a difference but it's not in the software but rather in
 > the lack of proper infrastructure to support the distro.

we try to support things as best as we can, there was indeed a massive 
flood of traffic at the 4.2 release time ( we were doing > 2TiB per day 
). Can you work with us to help build this infrastructure ? perhaps even 
contribute a mirror on a fast link ?

 > A client of mine discovered this the hard way a few days ago when
 > the 4.2 release came out. Against my advise he had set up a cron job
 > to automatically run "yum update" every morning and it tried to
 > upgrade from 4.1 to 4.2.


depending on what you are doing on that machine, its usually a bad idea 
- since there is no way you can regulate whats going in. Sounds like a 
bad move by the client, and he got what he was asking for.

 > While the upgrade did work it changed things and seemed to break
 > something. The problem arose when trying to verify that the update had
 > run properly as yum was unable to run after about 8.30am as the CentOS
 > folks had issued the update without bothering to get all the mirrors
 > sync'd.


the mirror.centos.org network was all updated at the time - but was 
running slow ( we were pretty much maxing out on the networks that we 
have access to ), most of the major external mirrors were also updated, 
while there were indeed some third party mirrors that were out of sync - 
it should not effect yum's running.

If you notice, the pkg update process is only run after the pkgs have 
been downloaded. If there is a checksum error, there is a pkg missing or 
the repository metadata does not match the pkg tree on the mirror - yum 
will error out and not run the update.

btw, you said - something broke... what was it that broke ?

Also, what were you trying to do to 'verify that the update had run 
through' ?

 > Consequently many CentOS users found that yum didn't work or that the
 > update failed or otherwise things went wrong and yum doesn't give
 > decent error messages.

You need to have some more significant examples here. There were in 
excess of 100,000 users who started updating within the first couple of 
days. Not sure if I would rate the odd user having network issues as 
being 'many CentOS users' - look at http://bugs.centos.org/ there were 
no issues reported, and in the mailing list most of the issues that 
people had were with a bug from upstream ( and was already pointed out 
to them in the release note )

 > This wasn't a problem with the distro but rather a reflection of the
 > fact that CentOS doesn't have competent release management and the
 > team don't understand online distribution issues.

We are open to suggestions, please feel free to step forwand and 
recommend ways in which to better manage the release. I think we did an 
outstanding job, given the circumstances.

There is already move to add mirrorlist support ( we have had a few 
people step forward with offers of mirrors hosted on GigE networed 
setup's and we want to use those to the max capability ).

 > For me this meant half a morning wasted investigating the cause of the
 > problem and getting my customers site back online (a change to the
 > mysql server meant that the customer's custom config wouldn't start).


do you have some bugzilla / issues numbers for the problems you 
reported? I dont know what the custom configs were, but if they were 
significant enough, perhaps an excldude in the yum config's would have 
been called for ? let me have the Issue tracking ID's and I'll dig into 
this for you. Be good to keep in mind for future releases.

 > The response from the CentOS folks on their irc channel to the yum
 > problem was "wait a day or two for the mirrors to catch up". That's
 > not acceptable in an enterprise distro.


I am not sure what your point is - on one hand you are saying that we 
should have held the release back while the mirrors were updated, and 
now you are saying that when you were asked to wait for a day, it is 
'not acceptable' ????

<plug>CentOS is a community oriented setup, we all put in our time, 
efforts and resources into building it and on occasion we even put in 
money from our own pockets to meet the costs associated. We need 
mirrors, why dont you help us spread the load and setup a mirror on a 
fast pipe to help everyone out a bit ? Specially if you are an ISP or 
sell services based on / around CentOS.</plug>

- KB



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