Fixing up2date under Fedora Core 1
The default install of FC1 points up2date at some horribly over used central distribution servers. Because of Fedora's popularity, these servers are generally unavailable at all times. Trying to download from them gave me terrible download rates (< 10KB/s) and tons of security problems. Luckily, Fedora is mirrored at tons of places around the world. Personally, I think up2date should make it easy to change mirrors but until it does, here's how to set a different mirror.
First, you need to go to the Fedora mirror list and find a server near you. For the purposes of this tutorial, I'm going to use my nearest mirror which is on HeaNET (http://ftp.heanet.ie/pub/fedora/linux/core/). Obviously you should replace this url with your nearest mirror.
Now we know the URL of our server, all we have to do is tell up2date to download from there. We do that by editing the up2date souces file. I like the vim editor so I use the following command (you must be logged in as root).
vim /etc/sysconfig/rhn/sources
Scroll down a bit and you'll see the following lines:
yum fedora-core-1 http://fedora.redhat.com/releases/fedora-core-1
yum updates-released http://fedora.redhat.com/updates/released/fedora-core-1
Now, these are the default distribution servers that I was complaining about so we want up2date to ignore these. We do that by putting a # at the beginning of both those lines.
#yum fedora-core-1 http://fedora.redhat.com/releases/fedora-core-1
#yum updates-released http://fedora.redhat.com/updates/released/fedora-core-1
Now we've gotten rid of those servers, time to tell up2date about where we want to download from. For my example, it would look like this:
yum fedora-core-1 http://ftp.heanet.ie/pub/fedora/linux/core/1/i386/os
yum updates-released http://ftp.heanet.ie/pub/fedora/linux/core/updates/1/i386
Now, notice that there are bits added to the mirror URL to make it work, it's important you add these in. From what I've seen, these are the same for every mirror so it's not complicated, just replace the part in italics in my sample code.
Now, sit back and watch those updates fly.
