Anthony Bryan wrote:

Hi,

You could use metalinks on your download page. Metalinks are used by download managers & contain Mirror & p2p locations for segmented downloads, along with automatic checksum verification when the download completes. It spreads the download between multiple servers so its faster for users, more reliable, & less load on any one server. Metalinks are backward compatible too.

If you're interested, you can try it out with aria2 (Unix command line) (http://aria2.sourceforge.net), Speed Download (Mac) (http://www.yazsoft.com), or GetRight (Windows) (http://www.getright.com), then clicking on these samples:

http://www.metalinker.org/samples.html

Also, OpenOffice.org uses metalinks to distribute their free office suite at http://distribution.openoffice.org/p2p/magnet.html

There's a video of metalink working in GetRight here: http://www.metalinker.org/implementation.html

You can create your own metalinks on the site, or I could make one for you if you'd like.

Metalinks are just simple XML like this:

<metalink version="3.0" xmlns="http://www.metalinker.org/"> <files> <file name="example.ext"> <verification> <hash type="md5">example-md5-hash</hash> <hash type="sha1">example-sha1-hash</hash> </verification> <resources> <url type="ftp">ftp://ftp.example1.com/example.ext</url> <url type="ftp">ftp://ftp.example2.com/example.ext</url> <url type="http">http://www.example1.com/example.ext</url> <url type="http">http://www.example2.com/example.ext</url> <url type="http">http://www.example3.com/example.ext</url> <url type="bittorrent">http://www.ex.com/example.ext.torrent</url> <url type="magnet"/> <url type="ed2k"/> </resources> </file> </files> </metalink>

hi Anthony,

Thanks for getting in touch about metalinks. I've personally never heard about this before, but it sounds interesting. The first question that comes to mind is - how many user end download clients support this format ?

And, if we are to publish these, we'd need some means to generate them automatically, perhaps a hook into the mirror-monitor scripts. But thats a future issue.

I am cross posting this to the CentOS-Devel list, so that more people might be able to get involved in the conversation. I suggest you subscribe to that list ( http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos-devel )