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Downloading bliss with Metalink (Linux.com)
Linux.com looks at
Metalink. "Getting popular software off the Internet can
sometimes be a struggle, even with all the mirrors and BitTorrent
Samaritans out there. When the Fedora project released Fedora Core 6 last
month, for instance, even several dozen mirrors weren't enough to serve
everyone, and torrent speeds weren't good enough because of a scarcity of
seeders. But thanks to Metalink I was able to sleep while my FC6 ISOs were
downloading."
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Downloading bliss with Metalink (Linux.com) Posted Nov 8, 2006 0:18 UTC (Wed) by ca9mbu (subscriber, #11098) [Link] The name of the project is somewhat unfortunate given that it matches Oracle's support site, https://metalink.oracle.com/ (especially given Oracle's recent press releases regarding an attempt to supercede Redhat in the enterprise Linux space).
Downloading bliss with Metalink (Linux.com) Posted Nov 8, 2006 16:17 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] Yes indeed. Given the historically awful response times of that site (especially bad while it was emblazoned with the old slogan 'Oracle Software Powers The Internet', to which one felt driven to respond 'no it doesn't or the Internet would be a hell of a lot slower than it is'), the idea of experiencing any kind of 'bliss' while downloading anything from it is quite preposterous :)
(it's much faster now and sometimes responds to simple lookups by document ID in under ten seconds. Google, tremble in your boots.)
Downloading bliss with Metalink (Linux.com) Posted Nov 10, 2006 8:14 UTC (Fri) by njs (subscriber, #40338) [Link] This is silly.
Those big fat (and overloaded) mirrors should simply run a bittorrent seeding daemon alongside (or in place of) their HTTP and FTP daemons. You might have to hack up the standard bittorrent client to optimize it for a seed-only situation like that, but this is not any harder than implementing a whole new mirror metadata description language!
Then one could simply use bittorrent, and it would perform strictly better than HTTP/FTP, with less load on the mirrors. All this ad hoc mirror selection, load-balancing, etc. etc. machinery is totally superfluous; bittorrent gives you all of those advantages for free!
Downloading bliss with Metalink (Linux.com) Posted Nov 10, 2006 12:38 UTC (Fri) by pheldens (guest, #19366) [Link] I agree. If you need to install a third party program anyway, it could as wel be bt. The more peers, the merrier.
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