Hi, yesterday I came across the so called "metalinks" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metalink Then, last night I've created metalinks for all sage download files. They are an xml file with multiple sources (list of all mirrors), they include hashcodes, and even hashcodes for partial chunks to repair broken downloads. To make it complete, I also created a torrent and included it in the metalink file. For now this makes no sense since we do not seed torrents, but who knows what will come ... btw, metalinks are used by ubuntu, openoffice, yum (linux package management) and may more.
What now? Now it is possible to resume paused downloads, your client downloads from multiple mirrors at once concurrently (like bittorrent), and from what i have tested the clients automatically select the best mirror for you! There are even some, that download via http/ftp and start sharing the partial data via bittorrent. I've added a paragraph to the download+installation guide: http://wiki.sagemath.org/DownloadAndInstallationGuide here an example: http://www.sagemath.org/mirror/win/meta/sage-vmware-4.1.1.zip.metalink [xml, plain text] Conclusion: all of you with moderate bandwidth who do not want to start downloading again if something breaks, i suggest to use this. The easiest way to get it is through this firefox extension: http://www.downthemall.net/ And yes, this mail is also a request for testing ;) [not all mirrors are in sync, so use the metalinks from http://sage.math.washington.edu/sage/ ] H --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send an email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to sage-devel-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URLs: http://www.sagemath.org -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
