I rolled out a new version of Fedora MirrorManager today which will do a better job of directing users to a download site that's closer to them.
Now, when yum downloads new packages, it will try servers in this order:
- from servers claiming your IP address range (handy for ISPs and private mirrors for whom local traffic is both faster and less expensive)
- from severs in a country you designate by passing '&country=us' or another 2-letter country code, in the call to the mirrorlist. In this way, if the GeoIP database is wrong for you, you can override it.
- from servers in your country (if any) as determined by GeoIP
- from servers on your continent (if any)
- from servers somewhere on the globe.
This is basically how it's been since the Fedora 7 launch, except there was no Step 4. By checking for up-to-date servers on your continent, this will reduce instances of people getting directed to a mirror on the other side of the world at random even when there was one closer to them.
As always, thanks to the >200 public mirror server administrators for supporting Fedora through your time, server equipment, and bandwidth.
This is also the first release where I had significant help from members of the Fedora community. Thanks to Ricky Zhou and Dimitris Glezos for their help making the publiclist pages look so much better. And thanks to Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams for enhancing python-GeoIP to enable getting the country->continent mapping cleanly.