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So you have an out of date version of Fedora installed but you still want to make sure its as up to date as possible and Redhat (and many others) have removed the repositories.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Clearly the system is still out of date and a newer version of fedora would be better but at least you can get it to the latest update and install software as required.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