Installing yum fastest mirror plugin on CentOS 5

Being in Malaysia don’t expect the best speeds when running “yum -y update“. I recommend installing the yum fastest mirror plugin to see some better results.

The plugin basically goes through the list of mirrors and determines which mirrors have the best response time. The results are then sorted and stored in a local cached copy.

Installation is simple,

1. # “yum install yum-fastestmirror” for CentOS 5 and “yum -y install yum-plugin-fastestmirror” for previous versions.

2. # “vi /etc/yum/pluginconf.d/fastestmirror.conf” ensure the settings described below and set properly.

[main]
enabled=1
verbose=0
socket_timeout=3
hostfilepath=/var/cache/yum/timedhosts.txt
maxhostfileage=1

3. # “yum -y update” and you should start seeing a difference.

# yum -y update
Loading “fastestmirror” plugin
Loading “installonlyn” plugin
Setting up Update Process
Setting up repositories
Loading mirror speeds from cached hostfile

More help available at the CentOs Wiki .