why mirrors ?

[Pascal Bleser]

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Mikus Grinbergs wrote:
> Running SUSE 10.1 64bit.  Issued 'smart update'.
> 
> It downloaded (apparently successfully) files primary.xml.gz and
> filelists.xml.gz for Packman from a mirror in Germany.  Then it
> *again* downloaded those same two files from a mirror in Belgium
> (apparently successfully).  Now it is **again** downloading those
> same two files from a mirror in Austria !!!
> 
> At approximately 1.0 KBps (my dial-up line has other transfers
> going on, too), it seems to be taking _forever_ for the 'smart
> update' to complete.  WHY does smart have to download more than
> one copy of these (huge) files (I see no error messages) ??

It doesn't. The only situation where I could imagine smart does that is
if the mirrors are badly out of sync.

When you run smart update, it only fetches a small file to check whether
smart's local copy of the repository metadata is still up-to-date or not:
- - for rpm-md it's repodata/repomd.xml (951 bytes for my repository)
- - for yast2 it's media.1/media (22 bytes for my repository)

media.1/media contains a serial number and repodata/repomd.xml contains
checksums and timestamps for the individual metadata files
(primary.xml.gz, filelists.xml.gz and other.xml.gz).
If the remote serial number/timestamp is different from the local one
(in /var/lib/smart/channels/), it will fetch the remote metadata files.
If not, then it won't.

If you don't like the mirrors, just remove all the mirrors and change
the channel baseurl's to your preferred mirror.

cheers
- --
  -o) Pascal Bleser     http://linux01.gwdg.de/~pbleser/
  /\\ <pascal.bleser at skynet.be>       <guru at unixtech.be>
 _\_v The more things change, the more they stay insane.
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