Anthony L. Bryan wrote:

Hi,

Still seeing if you'd like to use metalinks for your ISO downloads.

Metalinks contain mirror and p2p locations along with checksums and other metadata for faster and easier downloads. Downloads are distributed between mirrors and checksums are automatically verified when it finishes. Here's a good description:

'Metalink makes complex download pages obsolete by replacing long lists of download mirrors and BitTorrent trackers with a single .metalink file. As you might have already guessed, a .metalink file is a file that tells a download manager all the different ways it can download a file. The file itself takes the form of an open XML standard that can list an unlimited number of HTTP and FTP sources as well as BitTorrent trackers and ed2k and magnet links.' (http://www.downloadsquad.com/2006/08/28/metalinks-integrated-bittorrent-htt p-and-ftp-downloads/)

There's a metalink for CentOS at http://www.metalinker.org/samples/CentOS-4.4-i386-LiveCD.iso.metalink if anyone wants to try it out. Here's what part of it looks like:

<file name="CentOS-4.4-i386-LiveCD.iso">
  <version>4.4</version>
  <verification>
    <hash type="md5">747c9e33a10fdbf5919d9fd188ab7d23</hash>
  </verification>
  <resources>
    <url type="http"

preference="100">http://altruistic.lbl.gov/mirrors/centos/4.4/isos/i386/Cent OS-4.4-i386-LiveCD.iso</url> <url type="http" preference="100">http://centos.mirror.nac.net/4.4/isos/i386/CentOS-4.4-i386- LiveCD.iso</url> <url type="http" preference="100">http://dist1.800hosting.com/centos/4.4/isos/i386/CentOS-4.4 -i386-LiveCD.iso</url> <url type="http" location="us" preference="100">http://ftp.osuosl.org/pub/centos/4.4/isos/i386/CentOS-4.4-i 386-LiveCD.iso</url> </resources>

Download clients are available for Unix, Mac, & Windows. aria2 RPMs for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 are at http://dries.ulyssis.org/rpm/packages/aria2/info.html

OpenOffice.org and many Linux/BSD distributions are using metalink. Here's a few places:

http://distribution.openoffice.org/p2p/magnet.html http://en.opensuse.org/Released_Version#Metalink http://desktopbsd.net/index.php?id=73 http://www.pcbsd.org/?p=download http://www.archlinux.org/download/ http://www.redwall-firewall.com/content/view/14/33/ http://yui.mine.nu/berry/edownload.php http://puppylinux.org/wikka/Puppy210

We spoke about this earlier, and I also asked for comments - we didnt get too many here on this list. But, it would still be a good idea to get this somehow integrated into the CentOS release process.

Making it easier and adding more options to spread loads is always a good idea IMHO.