Hello,
We've been getting reports from several people about yum updates falling due to 
  a file not being available.

Please know that ftp.scientificlinux.org get's alot of traffic.  Especially 
after a new release, it get's an immense amount for about a month or two.  This 
is why we moved rsync.scientificlinux.org to be a different machine, hoping 
that it would help out.

What kind of load and traffic are we talking about.  The current load is 44, on 
a 2 cpu machine.  The current number of connections (http and ftp) varies 
between 550 and 600 at any particular time this morning.

The machine can handle it.  Our network can handle it.  That isn't what's 
bothering me.

There are some labs and universities that have their own mirror's, right at the 
lab and/or university.  These same labs and universities also have very large 
clusters (100's to 1000's of machines per cluster).  These same labs and 
universities are pointing their large clusters of machines at 
ftp.scientificlinux.org instead of their own mirrors.
This is causing the quality of service to go down for all the other users.

If you have a mirror.  Please use it, especially for your clusters.

Fastestmirror is also good.

We have the yum plugin fastestmirror in the repository, and we have plenty of 
plublic mirrors around the world.  Please use them.

   yum install yum-fastestmirror

In the directory /etc/yum.repos.d/ edit the files sl.repo and sl-security.repo, 
or sl-errata.repo.  Comment out the "baseurl=" line(s), and uncomment the 
"mirrorlist=" line.

I don't want to have to do anything drastic like force people to use mirrors, 
or force people to use fastestmirror.  I want mirrors to be an option people 
choose, not something that is forced on them.

So please, if you have a large cluster of machines, please use a mirror.

Thank You
Troy
-- 
__________________________________________________
Troy Dawson  [log in to unmask]  (630)840-6468
Fermilab  ComputingDivision/LCSI/CSI DSS Group
__________________________________________________