[CentOS-devel] Re: www.centos.org - Contact Us Form

Fri Aug 4 13:21:15 UTC 2006
Karanbir Singh <kbsingh at centos.org>

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 )

-- 
Karanbir Singh {kbsingh at centos.org}
The CentOS Project, http://www.centos.org/