fastestmirror

The fastest mirror plugin is designed for use in repository configurations where you have more than 1 mirror in a repo configuration. It makes a connection to each mirror, timing the connection and then sorts the mirrors by fastest to slowest for use by yum.

If you are using the default CentOS configuration, and if you are not behind a proxy server, fastestmirror is highly recommended.

To be able to use this plugin, you must enable plugins in your /etc/yum.conf file, see Yum Plugins for details. Yum plugins are enabled by default starting with CentOS 5.

You can install the fastestmirror plugin by using this command:

yum install yum-plugin-fastestmirror

Or with the following command on CentOS 5:

yum install yum-fastestmirror

After fastestmirror is installed, make sure that it is enabled. Edit the file /etc/yum/pluginconf.d/fastestmirror.conf and ensure that it contains the following lines:

[main]
verbose = 0
socket_timeout = 3
enabled = 1
hostfilepath = /var/cache/yum/timedhosts.txt
maxhostfileage = 1

To exclude a specific mirror, TLD, or something in between, add an 'exclude=' line to /etc/yum/pluginconf.d/fastestmirror.conf:

[main]
...
exclude=.gov, facebook, myspace, junk-mirror.com

With both the protectbase and fastestmirror yum plugins installed, you should get the fastest updates with maximum protection from accidental damage from 3rd party repositories.