Re: [tlug] Cant Read TLUG Digest Messages

[Matt Gushee <mgushee@example.com>]

On Wed, Oct 23, 2002 at 06:10:44PM +0900, nmacphee wrote:
> 4
> My main point! (Yippee!)

Then you might want to say so in your subject line.

> I am also trying to download the much coveted redhat 8.0, I am using an ntt 
> b-flets 100mbps connection ( ahem!) and I am having no joy. It seems to me 
> like there are just too many people trying to get on that server, coz I cant 
> get beyond downloading about 10 MB and the downfeed hangs.  I am using 
> download acceerator plus and try hopping between mirror sites in asia/aus. It 
> looks the same. 

I have never gotten good download speed from any HTTP or FTP server in
Australia, either when I was in Japan or now that I'm back in the US. If
you're going outside Japan, you might try sunsite.auc.dk ... haven't
used it lately, but depending on the time of day I was often able to get
excellent download speeds between there and Japan.

> 
> The 2 strange things are:
> 1 I downloaded all the 8.0 iso images v quickly on saturday from a v good 
> connection, but they wont let me burn an iso image from there

They won't let you? Who's 'they', and how are they preventing you from
burning an image?

> and I dont know 
> how to ftp (no need to try and explain it to me. It is too difficult.)

If you think FTP is too difficult, why on earth would you want to stray
beyond the safe boundaries of the Windows corral?

Pardon me for that touch of sarcasm, but really: FTPing the images is
basically a matter of 3 simple commands:

  open   <server>
  cd     <directory_where_the_file_you_want_lives>
  get    <file>

(with perhaps a few 'dir' commands to get your bearings)

I would strongly encourage you to learn FTP. It's not that hard, and
usually does a much better job of downloading large files than a web
browser, because that's what it was designed for. It might take you a
bit of time to get comfortable with the commands, but there are really
only a handful that you need to know. And once you learn them I
guarantee you will spend a lot less time flailing around trying to find
better download sites.

If you're currently using Linux I'd recommend NcFTP. Although it is
command-based rather than graphical, it has some very nice features to
take the painful edge off--e.g. tab completion of known server names, 
using wildcards with the GET command, so you can say 'get gtk*.rpm', and
it just works, which isn't true for plain vanilla FTP.

Another very useful feature of NcFTP is the ability to continue
interrupted downloads--and with files of several hundred MB,
occasional interruptions are a fact of life, even with good servers and
good connections.

> 2 I have a similar problem getting an iso image from lycoris and those servers 
> are not overloaded...

Yeah, well, ISO images are big. There's a tool called Jigdo that can
help with this kind of stuff: using a small template file that describes
the contents of an ISO image, it goes and downloads the files from
ordinary software archives, then assembles them into a complete ISO
image on your machine. Extremely cool. Unfortunately, though, its
origins are in the Debian project, and I don't think RedHat et al. have
caught on to it yet, so you won't find Jigdo templates for RedHat Linux.
I suppose you could theoretically make your own template to create ISOs
of anything you wanted, but if you think FTP is hard you're probably not
about to try that. Nonetheless, if you start to feel a bit more
adventurous, check out:

  http://home.in.tum.de/~atterer/jigdo/

Happy hunting!

-- 
Matt Gushee                 When a nation follows the Way,
Englewood, Colorado, USA    Horses bear manure through
mgushee@example.com           its fields;
http://www.havenrock.com/   When a nation ignores the Way,
                            Horses bear soldiers through
                                its streets.
                                
                            --Lao Tzu (Peter Merel, trans.)