[Pardus-devel] Improving availability and guaranteeing integrity in ISO downloads

[Anthony Bryan]

Hi,
		
I was hoping you could check out Metalinks for your ISO downloads.
Metalink is an XML format supported by download managers that
lists all the mirrors & p2p sources you can get a file from, along
with checksums and other stuff. The idea is to make the whole download
process easier, automated, and less error prone. If you include chunk
checksums, ftp/http downloads can be repaired instead of starting over from the
beginning.

I've put metalinks up at http://www.metalinker.org/samples.html#pardus
. The chunk
checksums are very important, because w/o them I got errors in the
FTP/HTTP download. I ended up using bittorrent to correct the
errors until I could make metalinks w/ the chunk checksums, but some
people can't use p2p where they are.

Around 12 download managers, FTP & p2p clients support Metalink. If
you're interested in using Metalink, you can include download tools
like aria2 ( http://aria2.sourceforge.net/ ) in your distribution.
openSUSE, OpenOffice.org, and a bunch of other Linux/BSD distributions
use it.

More info at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metalink

Here's part of what a .metalink looks like:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<metalink version="3.0" generator="Metalink Editor version 1.0.0"
xmlns="http://www.metalinker.org/">
  <publisher>
    <name>Pardus Linux</name>
    <url>http://www.pardus.org.tr/</url>
  </publisher>
  <identity>Pardus Linux</identity>
  <version>2007.2_Beta</version>
  <files>
    <file name="Pardus-Kurulan-2007.2_Beta.iso">
      <size>719085568</size>
      <verification>
        <hash type="md5">d10dce4cf43bcb74cd2c0509afc58cb5</hash>
        <hash type="sha1">b2a4f470c24e36b8b077cbfc0284c15a0a008e9a</hash>
      </verification>
      <resources>
        <url type="ftp" location="tr"
preference="100">ftp://ftp.pardus.org.tr/pub/pardus/kurulan/2007.2_Beta/Pardus-Kurulan-2007.2_Beta.iso</url>
      </resources>
    </file>
  </files>
</metalink>

-- 
(( Anthony Bryan
  )) Metalink [ http://www.metalinker.org ]