[RndTbl] Tip in the newsletter (fedora updates)

[Gilbert E. Detillieux]

According to Mike Pfaiffer:
> I tried the tip in the newsletter about redirecting the updates to the MUUG 
> site. I updated today. It took less than 30 seconds (as opposed to an hour 
> and a bit).

Glad to hear it worked, and that you got very good response time.  Let's
hope that lasts!  As of this morning, 150 unique host addresses have been
loading yum header information from our HTTP server, and I'm expecting that
number to rise quickly!

Why's that?  Well, I noticed a lot of hits to my fedora-updates.html article
on the web server were coming from Google searches.  I ran a Google search
for the string "fedora updates" myself, and found that my article was ranked
in second place, behind the updates page on the official Fedora Project web
site!  Yikes!  Open the floodgates!

Those 150 unique addresses I mentioned above are coming in from all over the
world, too.  (Only 15 are from within the umanitoba.ca domain, and those are
all from machines I configured myself.  It's actually 17 machines, but 3 are
behind a NAT router.  Interestingly, an address on mts.net has as high a hit
count on our header.info files as that NAT router, tying it for first place!)

> It took a bit to figure out how to manually edit the file rather than use 
> patch. The whole thing turned out to be really simple. Just replace two URLs.

Yup, the change is pretty easy.  BTW, if you visit the article online...

http://www.muug.mb.ca/fedora-updates.html

... you can download the patches by clicking on the sub-header for each
patch.  That will save you some typing and the reduce the chances of a typo.

Of course, if our mirror gets bogged down from overuse, you may want to
point to a different mirror.  Fortunately, there are a few others right in
Canada now...

http://fedora.redhat.com/download/mirrors.html

> Thanks guys...

You're welcome.

> P.S. I'm going to be looking into what Gilbert said here pretty soon. ;-)

I'm assuming you mean my earlier message about multimedia support?

I haven't actually tried any of the tips in Eric Raymond's HOW-TO yet, but
it all looks fairly straightforward.  Unfortunately, I had already set up
multimedia support the hard way (with lots of trial and error, and lots of
Google searches) on my home machine.  It's working for me now, so I'm not in
a rush to change it (don't fix it if it ain't broke), but I may redo parts
of it, e.g. to use RPM packages as much as possible, rather than downloading
source and binaries from the source sites and hand-installing things.

It's much cleaner if all the installs are contained within RPM packages,
especially if you can automatically update them later, via yum or up2date.

-- 
Gilbert E. Detillieux		E-mail:	<gedetil at cs.umanitoba.ca>
Dept. of Computer Science	Web:	http://www.cs.umanitoba.ca/~gedetil/
University of Manitoba		Phone:	(204)474-8161
Winnipeg, MB, CANADA  R3T 2N2	Fax:	(204)474-7609