> 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 ) Hi Karanbir, thanks for writing back. You haven't heard about metalinks before because its all word of mouth so far :) OpenOffice.org is the only 'large' site using it at the moment. It was really designed with ISOs in mind tho, so I'd be excited if you used it. Currently, 3 clients support metalink, one for Mac (Speed Download), Unix (aria2 - http://aria2.sourceforge.net), and Windows (GetRight). 5 more clients are in the process of adding support. As far as automation, http://metalink.packages.ro/ has perl source for generating metalinks. If you need hooks into your mirror-monitor scripts, I would be interested in supporting development of those so they could be used elsewhere too. I've made a metalink for CentOS-4.3-i386-LiveCD.iso (http://www.metalinker.org/samples.html#isos). I've spent a few minutes on this, if you could, I'd ask you to try it out once (at a place with a good net connection). If you aren't interested, fair enough. Get aria, then: aria2c http://www.metalinker.org/samples/CentOS-4.3-i386-LiveCD.iso.metalink It should download (speedily) from a bunch of mirrors, then automatically verify the checksum when finished. The next version of aria2 will have even more features. Anthony Bryan http://www.metalinker.org/