Yum-fastestmirror, Use fastest mirror for downloads

Yum is a great package management utility, but sometimes the only thing that annoys me is a slow download mirror. I am sure this will be a common problem among regular Fedora or Redhat users. Yum-fastestmirror aims to solve this problem. It provides a Yum plugin which measures the speed of available mirrors and sorts the list so that priority is given to the fastest mirrors. Read futher to see how to install yum-fastestmirror and configure properly to make this problem go away.

You can install it using yum (u r in deep trouble if you can't even find a server fast enough to install it ).

[chia]$ yum install yum-fastestmirror

Enable Yum-fastestmirror

After installing it you should check it it is enabled. In order to do that, open the file /etc/yum/pluginconf.d/fastestmirror.conf and make sure that it has the following lines.

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

Configure Yum-fastestmirror

If you want to exclude a particular mirror then you can add "exclude=" line in the fastestmirror.conf file and enter the URLs separated by commas. e.g.

[main]
......
....
exclude = some-mirror.com, other-junk-mirror.com

Once you have installed yum-fastestmirror and configure it properly the next time you run yum update or yum install you will see this additional line showing that yum-fastestmirror plugin is loaded and working.

Loading “fastestmirror” plugin
Setting up Install Process
Setting up repositories

I hope this will make installation a lot quicker for most you.