Just a suggestion

[Jonathan Steffan]

Peter Schmidt wrote:
> Hi I'm a new user to Linux and I've never been able to
> use Fedora but I'd really like to.  Every time I
> attempt to download, it takes a half day at least to
> finish.  When it does, theres some error on the iso
> every single time or the download somehow messes up on
> the way.  I don't feel the need to order a DVD so
> instead I thought I would suggest making a mirror
> where there are maybe about 30 total .rar files.  This
> way people with slower internet can actually download
> the OS and people like me won't have to worry about a
> few MB causing the whole DVD to malfunction.  I
> personally wouldn't bother to do this with 8, once 9
> is released, then I would like to see segments.

Jigdo[a] is a more graceful solution to this issue. Rather then having
yet another arbitrary chunk format[1] to get the DVD image(s) either use
the existing[2] ones (read: torrent[b]) or try Jigdo. With Jigdo, every
file downloaded is checksummed so the most amount of data that will have
to be re-downloaded is the largest file in the Jigdo definition. It also
allows you to use already downloaded data or a local mirror.

What you really should do at this point is start the torrent download
for the ISO you wanted, stop it, stick the broken ISO image in the
location the torrent client was downloading to and start the torrent
again. Your torrent client should verify each chunk individually and
only need to download the chunks that have flawed data.


[a] http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/JigdoRelease
[b] BitTorrent is also chunked but normally in much smaller pieces and
each piece is summed so there is no data corruption and you gain the
value of the "swarm" (multiple locations to pull data from at the same time)
[1] a rar being a random slice of binary data packed into different
files to be put back together
[2] http://torrent.fedoraproject.org/



-- 
Jonathan Steffan
daMaestro
GPG Fingerprint: 93A2 3E2F DC26 5570 3472 5B16 AD12 6CE7 0D86 AF59