Downloading Packages via Red Hat Official Network is Slow in mainland China

Environment

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux all versions
• Systems which were registered by subscription-manager to Customer Portal

Issue

• Downloading packages via Red Hat official network is slow in mainland China and the senario includes
  • Directly download contents from This content is not included.access.redhat.com/downloads via browser
  • yum install <packages>
  • reposync <repos>
  • yumdownloader <packages>

Resolution

• Confirm that your firewall or web proxy configuration is not implementing IP address whitelisting of Red Hat CDN requests. This solution is not compatible with the whitelisting of the CDN CIDR lists.
• Red Hat Global has enabled a China specific CDN server. To speed up the command line package downloading, switch to the China specific CDN server and clear the cache by running the following the command.

# subscription-manager config --rhsm.baseurl=https://china.cdn.redhat.com
# subscription-manager refresh
# yum clean all
# yum makecache

• For downloading contents from This content is not included.access.redhat.com/downloads via browser, the downloading speed has improved and customers don't have to make any extra configurations.

Root Cause

• The default content base URL specified in /etc/rhsm/rhsm.confis https://cdn.redhat.com. The IP addresses mapped to the this URL are all outside of mainland China and it could take long time to visit. Red Hat Global has enabled a China specific CDN server to improve downloading speed.

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