How to configure yum to use a particular mirror

So you have an out of date version of Fedora installed but you still want to make sure its as up to date as possible and Redhat (and many others) have removed the repositories. If you can find an old mirror, http://fedora.mirror.facebook.com/ for instance then you should be able to run up2date and use yum to install software.

First however you need to tell yum to look at the mirror you have found and not rely on download.fedora.redhat.com.

Go to the /etc/yum.repos.d directory.

Here you will find the definitions of the repositories. On Fedora Core 4 I commented out the mirrorlist option and added in my own values for baseurl.

$ cat fedora.repo

[base]
name=Fedora Core $releasever - $basearch - Base
#baseurl=http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/core/$releasever/$basearch/os/
baseurl=http://fedora.mirror.facebook.com/linux/core/$releasever/$basearch/os/
#mirrorlist=http://fedora.redhat.com/download/mirrors/fedora-core-$releasever
enabled=1
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-fedora

$ cat fedora-updates.repo

[updates-released]
name=Fedora Core $releasever - $basearch - Released Updates
#baseurl=http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/core/updates/$releasever/$basearch/
baseurl=http://fedora.mirror.facebook.com/linux/core/updates/$releasever/$basearch/
#mirrorlist=http://fedora.redhat.com/download/mirrors/updates-released-fc$releasever
enabled=1
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-fedora

$ cat fedora-extras.repo

[extras]
name=Fedora Extras $releasever - $basearch
#baseurl=http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/extras/$releasever/$basearch/
baseurl=http://fedora.mirror.facebook.com/linux/extras/$releasever/$basearch/
#mirrorlist=http://fedora.redhat.com/download/mirrors/fedora-extras-$releasever
enabled=1
gpgkey=file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-fedora-extras
gpgcheck=1

Now you can happily use up2date and yum.

Clearly the system is still out of date and a newer version of fedora would be better but at least you can get it to the latest update and install software as required.

If you come across an issue where yum FC4 is looking in FC3 directories then do the following:-

$ cd /usr/share/rhn/up2date_client

$ vi sourcesConfig.py and comment out the releasever="3" below #FIXME:0

Content-type application/pdf does not work using Firefox on Mac

Today we had a customer complain they could not open our invoices which are pdf's produced via a cgi script.

It quickly became apparent that it only happens in Firefox on a Mac. Firefox on other platforms has no issues, nor does Safari on a Mac.

A quick google uncovered this known bug.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=416094

It appears firefox on Max ignores the Content-Type header and will only automatically open a pdf when presented with a .pdf file extension.

I managed to 'solve' the problem by adding the following http header to the output.

Content-Disposition: inline; filename="invoice.pdf"

This just tells the browser the default file name and thus gets round the issue. Still works in IE and Firefox on a PC and fixes the issue on a Mac.