yum configure to only download one package at a time in Fedora?

Question

I am trying to upgrade my system and through our corporate firewall/network filters/etc, the bandwidth is limited. Today while doing an upgrade, yum was downloading five packages at a time.

Due to the limits, I was running into a under X bytes for 60 seconds restart.

The limit is such that when there are large packages (eclipse) it gets stuck restarting each package over and over until it has run out of mirrors.

I read through the yum.conf man and I cannot find a way to tell yum to only download a single package.

This is on a f20 system and I am trying to get to F23 but I cannot get fedup on f20 to work through our corporate firewall and dnf won't play.

fedora-upgrade is the command that I am using.

Answer 1

It's extremely unwise to jump 3 releases (F20 to F23) via upgrades. For maximum success, do F20->F21, F21->F22, then F22->F23. In fact, you'd best be served by backing up all your stuff and doing a fresh install of F23 (there's been a LOT of changes since F20).

Note also that the upgrade sequence will probably have problems since F20 and F21 are both end-of-lifed and some of the repo mirrors won't have the content any longer. In fact, the Fedora project itself moves the content to http://archives.fedoraproject.org/pub/archive/fedora/linux/releases for end-of-life releases.

Now, as far as your slow downloads, you might try doing this as the root user:

echo "0" >/proc/sys/net/ipv4/tcp_sack

and see if that improves things (depends on how your firewall behaves). If it does, you can make it permanent by adding the following line to either your /etc/sysctl.conf file or create a new /etc/sysctl.d/10-openuptcp.conf file (depends on how old your setup is) and put it in there:

net.ipv4.tcp_sack = 0